my life, the recollection of which I deliberately shun; but they
have always been absolutely unexpected and unanticipated
calamities. Yet even these have never been as bad as I should have
expected them to be. The strange thing is that experience never
comes to one's aid, and that one never gets patience or courage
from the thought that the reality will be in all probability less
distressing than the anticipation; for the simple reason that the
fertile imagination is always careful to add that this time the
occasion will be intolerable, and that at all events it is better
to be prepared for the worst that may happen. Moreover, one wastes
force in anticipating perhaps half-a-dozen painful possibilities,
when, after all, they are alternatives, and only one of them can
happen. That is what makes my present situation so depressing, that
I instinctively clothe it in its worst horrors, and look forward to
a long and dreary life, in which my only occupation will be an
attempt to pass the weary hours. Faithless? yes, of course it is
faithless! but the rational philosophy, which says that it will all
probably come right, does not penetrate to the deeper region in
which the mind says to itself that there is no hope of amendment.

Can one acquire, by any effort of the mind, this kind of patience?
I do not think one can. The most that one can do is to behave as
far as possible like one playing a heavy part upon the stage, to
say with trembling lips that one has hope, when the sick mind
beneath cries out that there is none.

Perhaps one can practise a sort of indifference, and hope that
advancing years may still the beating heart and numb the throbbing
nerve. But I do not even desire to live life on these terms. The
one great article of my creed has been that one ought not to lose