As soon as he exacts nothing of it, it gives him all—all its qualities for his discrimination and delectation. There is no way to return to his youth by retracing the caterpillar progress of the senses or by the renovation of cells that have become clogged with the hard deposit of years. But all those old interests which he had thought dead are now reborn with wings. He can return to his past, he can flit into his future, with the swift flight of a butterfly. While he seems to sleep in the barred prison-house of his character, and his old sweetheart weeps over the baldheaded, roundwaisted man of property gently snoring there, he perchance has discovered that she can't be met at the old trysting place any more, and has pushed on up the highroad to the detour of pure poetic contemplation where all her fair qualities, her joy and blitheness and beauty, are recollected in tranquillity. Out of the death of the possessive passion, a rebirth of the mind and imagination!
If this miracle has happened, he feels, at forty, the possibility not merely of a new life but of a new kind of life opening before him. He sees the necessity of revising the "theory of education." At forty, instead of killing off the nerves, one should be occupied in reviving the spirits. Instead of closing old doors, one should be cutting new windows. Instead of sitting down and going to sleep at his own point of view, he should hunt for new ones, if he has to go to China or Alaska or Tierra del Fuego to find them. What a man of forty
