unchanged; but if I ever thought this an easy task I must be an incredible
fool. I do not even know with any certainty if there are irons in me
still, or whether I can shape them if there are. Since the winter, life
has made me lonely and small; I idle and loiter here, remembering that
once things were different. Now that I have reached daylight and men
again, I begin to understand all this. I was a different person once. The
wave has its feathered crest, and so had I; wine has its fire, and so had
I. Neurasthenia, the ape of all the diseases, pursues me.

What then? No, I do not mourn this. Mourn? It is for women to mourn. Life
is only a loan, and I am grateful for the loan. At times I have had gold
and silver and copper and iron and other small metals; it was a great
delight to live in the world, much greater than an endless life away from
the world; but pleasure cannot last. I know of no one who has not been
through the same thing; but I know of no one who will admit it. How they
have declined! But they themselves have said:

"See how everything is better!"

At their first jubilee, they left life behind and began a vegetating
existence; once one is fifty, the seventies begin. And the irons were no
longer red-hot; there were no irons. But by heaven, how stubbornly
Simplicity insisted the irons were there, insisted that they were red.

"See the irons!" Simplicity said. "See how red they are!"

As though it mattered that death can be kept off for another twenty years
from one who has already begun to perish! I have no use for such a way of
thinking; but you have, no doubt, you with your cheerful mediocrity and
school education. A one-armed man can still walk; a one-legged man can lie