for George a thought of something as remote as the moons of Jupiter:
he could not possibly have conceived such an age ever coming to be
his own: five years was the limit of his thinking in time. Five years
ago he had been a child not yet fourteen; and those five years were an
abyss. Five years hence he would be almost twenty-four; what the
girls he knew called "one of the older men." He could imagine himself
at twenty-four, but beyond that, his powers staggered and refused the
task. He saw little essential difference between thirty-eight and
eighty-eight, and his mother was to him not a woman but wholly a
mother. He had no perception of her other than as an adjunct to
himself, his mother; nor could he imagine her thinking or doing
anything--falling in love, walking with a friend, or reading a book--
as a woman, and not as his mother. The woman, Isabel, was a stranger
to her son; as completely a stranger as if he had never in his life
seen her or heard her voice. And it was to-night, while he stood with
her, "receiving," that he caught a disquieting glimpse of this
stranger whom he thus fleetingly encountered for the first time.

Youth cannot imagine romance apart from youth. That is why the roles
of the heroes and heroines of plays are given by the managers to the
most youthful actors they can find among the competent. Both middle-
aged people and young people enjoy a play about young lovers; but only
middle-aged people will tolerate a play about middle-aged lovers;
young people will not come to see such a play, because, for them,
middle-aged lovers are a joke--not a very funny one. Therefore, to
bring both the middle-aged people and the young people into his house,
the manager makes his romance as young as he can. Youth will indeed
be served, and its profound instinct is to be not only scornfully
amused but vaguely angered by middle-age romance. So, standing beside
his mother, George was disturbed by a sudden impression, corning upon