An early deep-seated love to which we become faithless has its unfailing
Nemesis, if only in that division of soul which narrows all newer joys
by the intrusion of regret and the established presentiment of change. I
refer not merely to the love of a person, but to the love of ideas,
practical beliefs, and social habits. And faithlessness here means not a
gradual conversion dependent on enlarged knowledge, but a yielding to
seductive circumstance; not a conviction that the original choice was a
mistake, but a subjection to incidents that flatter a growing desire. In
this sort of love it is the forsaker who has the melancholy lot; for an
abandoned belief may be more effectively vengeful than Dido. The child
of a wandering tribe caught young and trained to polite life, if he
feels an hereditary yearning can run away to the old wilds and get his
nature into tune. But there is no such recovery possible to the man who
remembers what he once believed without being convinced that he was in
error, who feels within him unsatisfied stirrings towards old beloved
habits and intimacies from which he has far receded without conscious
justification or unwavering sense of superior attractiveness in the new.
This involuntary renegade has his character hopelessly jangled and out
of tune. He is like an organ with its stops in the lawless condition of
obtruding themselves without method, so that hearers are amazed by the
most unexpected transitions--the trumpet breaking in on the flute, and
the oböe confounding both.

Hence the lot of Mixtus affects me pathetically, notwithstanding that he
spends his growing wealth with liberality and manifest enjoyment. To
most observers he appears to be simply one of the fortunate and also
sharp commercial men who began with meaning to be rich and have become
what they meant to be: a man never taken to be well-born, but
surprisingly better informed than the well-born usually are, and
distinguished among ordinary commercial magnates by a personal kindness