Part 5 (2/2)

What a bore it is, waking up in the morning always the same person. I wish I were unflinching and emphatic, and had big, bushy eyebrows and a Message for the Age. I wish I were a deep Thinker, or a great Ventriloquist.

I should like to be refined and melancholy, the victim of a hopeless pa.s.sion; to love in the old, stilted way, with impossible Adoration and Despair under the pale-faced Moon.

I wish I could get up; I wish I were the world's greatest Violinist. I wish I had lots of silver, and first Editions, and green ivory.

_In The Park_

”Yes,” I said one afternoon in the Park, as I looked rather contemptuously at the people of Fas.h.i.+on, moving slow and well-dressed in the suns.h.i.+ne, ”but how about the others, the Courtiers and Beauties and Dandies of the past? They wore fine costumes, and glittered for their hour in the summer air. What has become of them?” I somewhat rhetorically asked.

They were all dead now. Their day was over. They were cold in their graves.

And I thought of those severe spirits who, in garrets far from the Park and Fas.h.i.+on, had scorned the fumes and tinsel of the noisy World.

But, good Heavens! these severe spirits were, it occurred to me, all, as a matter of fact, quite as dead as the others.

_The Correct_

I am sometimes visited by a suspicion that everything isn't quite all right with the Righteous; that the Moral Law speaks in m.u.f.fled and dubious tones to those who listen most scrupulously for its dictates. I feel sure I have detected a look of doubt and misgiving in the eyes of its earnest upholders.

But there is no such shadow or cloud on the faces in Club windows, or in the eyes of drivers of four-in-hands, or of fas.h.i.+onable young men walking down Piccadilly. For these live by a Rule which has not been drawn down from far-off and questionable skies, and needs no sanction; what they do is Correct, and that is all. Correctly dressed from head to foot, they pa.s.s, with correct speech and thoughts and gestures, correctly across the roundness of the Earth.

_”Where Do I Come In?”_

When I read in the _Times_ about India and all its problems and populations; when I look at the letters in large type of important personages, and find myself face to face with the Questions, Movements, and great Activities of the Age, ”Where do I come in?” I ask myself uneasily.

Then in the great _Times_-reflected world I find the corner where I play my humble but necessary part. For I am one of the unpraised, unrewarded millions without whom Statistics would be a bankrupt science. It is we who are born, who marry, who die, in constant ratios; who regularly lose so many umbrellas, post just so many unaddressed letters every year. And there are enthusiasts among us who, without the least thought of their own convenience, allow omnibuses to run over them; or throw themselves month by month, in fixed numbers, from the London bridges.

_Microbes_

But how Is one to keep free from those mental microbes that worm-eat people's brains--those Theories and Diets and Enthusiasms and infectious Doctrines that we are always liable to catch from what seem the most innocuous contacts? People go about laden with germs; they breathe creeds and convictions on you whenever they open their mouths. Books and newspapers are simply creeping with them--the monthly Reviews seem to have room for nothing else.

<script>