The latter are like a District Railway train,
going perpetually round and round the same Inner Circle. As far as
my experience goes, the former are the more interesting people to
meet.
To persons of my time of life, the last verse of "Forty years on"
has a tendency to linger in the memory. It runs--
"Forty years on, growing older and older,
Shorter in wind, as in memory long,
Feeble of foot, and rheumatic of shoulder,
What will it help you that once you were strong?"
Although it is now fifty, instead of "forty years on," I
indignantly disclaim the "feeble of foot," whilst reluctantly
pleading guilty to "rheumatic of shoulder." It is common to most
people, as they advance in life, to note with a sorrowful
satisfaction the gradual decay of the physical powers of their
contemporaries, though they always seem to imagine that they
themselves have retained all their pristine vigour, and have
successfully resisted every assault of Time's battering-ram. The
particular sentiment described in German as "Schadenfreude,"
"pleasure over another's troubles" (how characteristic it is that
there should be no equivalent in any other language for this
peculiarly Teutonic emotion!), makes but little appeal to the
average Briton except where questions of age and of failing powers
come into play, and obviously this only applies to men: no lady
ever grows old for those who are really fond of her; one always
sees her as one likes best to think of her.
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