*
It is good to have been young in youth and, as years go on,
to grow older. Many are already old before they are
through their teens; but to travel deliberately through
one's ages is to get the heart out of a liberal education.
Times change, opinions vary to their opposite, and still
this world appears a brave gymnasium, full of sea-bathing,
and horse exercise, and bracing, manly virtues; and what
can be more encouraging than to find the friend who was
welcome at one age, still welcome at another? Our
affections and beliefs are wiser than we; the best that is
in us is better than we can understand; for it is grounded
beyond experience, and guides us, blindfold but safe, from
one age on to another.
*
But faces have a trick of growing more and more
spiritualised and abstract in the memory, until nothing
remains of them but a look, a haunting expression; just
that secret quality in a face that is apt to slip out
somehow under the cunningest painter's touch, and leave the
portrait dead for the lack of it.
*
Pitiful is the case of the blind, who cannot read the face;
pitiful that of the deaf who cannot follow the changes of
the voice. And there are others also to be pitied; for
there are some of an inert, uneloquent nature, who have
been denied all the symbols of communication, who have
neither a lively play of facial expression, nor speaking
gestures, nor a responsive voice, nor yet the gift of
frank, explanatory speech: people truly made of clay,
people tied for life into a bag which no one can undo.
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