your charge for telling me how you do it? Instead of me talking to
you, you ought to be talking to me. Please come forward. That you
exist, I am convinced, and that I have not yet encountered you is my
loss. Meanwhile, until you appear, I will continue to chat with my
companions in distress--that innumerable band of souls who are
haunted, more or less painfully, by the feeling that the years slip
by, and slip by, and slip by, and that they have not yet been able
to get their lives into proper working order.

If we analyse that feeling, we shall perceive it to be, primarily,
one of uneasiness, of expectation, of looking forward, of
aspiration. It is a source of constant discomfort, for it behaves
like a skeleton at the feast of all our enjoyments. We go to the
theatre and laugh; but between the acts it raises a skinny finger at
us. We rush violently for the last train, and while we are cooling
a long age on the platform waiting for the last train, it promenades
its bones up and down by our side and inquires: "O man, what hast
thou done with thy youth? What art thou doing with thine age?" You
may urge that this feeling of continuous looking forward, of
aspiration, is part of life itself, and inseparable from life
itself. True!

But there are degrees. A man may desire to go to Mecca. His
conscience tells him that he ought to go to Mecca. He fares forth,
either by the aid of Cook's, or unassisted; he may probably never
reach Mecca; he may drown before he gets to Port Said; he may perish
ingloriously on the coast of the Red Sea; his desire may remain
eternally frustrate. Unfulfilled aspiration may always trouble him.
But he will not be tormented in the same way as the man who,
desiring to reach Mecca, and harried by the desire to reach Mecca,