Human Repetends

"Come!" cried Marston, "the story of your embodied ghost! Speak, thou gloomy Pythagorean!"

"Most men," began Pontifex, "however roughly the world has used them, can recall a period in their lives when they were absolutely happy, when each night closed with the collection of new pleasures tasted, when the progress of each day was cheered by the experience of unlooked-for novelties and when the awakening to another dawn was a pure physical delight unmarred by those cankering anxieties for the fortune of the hour which are the burden of the poor, the ambitious, and the intriguing. To most men, also, this gold time comes, when the cares of a mother, or the coquettish attention of sisters, aid to shield the young and eager soul from the blighting influences of wordly debaucheries. Fortunate is he among us who can look back on youth spent on the innocent enjoyments of the country, or who possesses a mind moulded in its adolescence by the fingers of well-mannered and pious women.

"My first initiation into the business of living took place under different auspices. The only son of a rich widow who lived but for the gratification of a literary and political ambition, I was thrown when still a boy into the society men thrice my age, and was tolerated as a clever impertinence in all those witty and wicked circles in which virtuous women are conspicuous by their absence. My father lived indifferently in Paris or London, and, patronized by dandies, artists, and scribblers who form, in both cities, male world of fashionable idleness, I was suffered at six to ape the vices of sixty. Indeed, so long as I was reported be moving only in that set to which my father chose to ally himself, he never cared to inquire how I spent the extravagant allowance which his indifference rather than his generosity permitted me to waste. You can guess the result of such a training. The admirer of men whose success in love and play were the theme of common talk--for six months; the worshipper of artists whose genius was to revolutionize Europe--only they died of late hours and tobacco; the pet of women whose daring beauty made their names famous for three years; I discovered at twenty years of age that the pleasurable path I had trodden so gaily led to a hospital or a debtors' prison, that love meant money, friendship and endorsement on a bill, and that the rigid exercise of a profound and calculating selfishness alone rendered tolerable a life at once so deceitful and so barren. In this view of the world I was supported by those middle-aged Mephistopheles (survivors of the storms which had wrecked so many argosies), whose cynical well-bred worshippers of self who realize in the nineteenth century that notion of the devil which was invented by the early Christians. With these good gentlemen lived, emulating their cynicism, rivalling their sarcasms, and neutralizing the superiority which their experience gave them, by the exercise of that potentiality for present enjoyment which is the privilege of youth.