“It is strange how much stronger in old age than in youth is the tendency to live in the hereafter. Not the real hereafter of another world, but the delusive hereafter of this. Tell a lad of eighteen that he must wait a year or two for anything he desires very eagerly, and he becomes utterly despondent of attaining his wish; but an old man of seventy is perfectly ready to make arrangements or submit to sacrifices for his personal benefit to be rewarded in ten years’ time or so, when he persuades himself he will still be quite capable of enjoying life. The people who purchase annuities, who plant trees, who breed horses for their own riding are all past middle age. Perhaps they have seen so many things brought about by waiting, more particularly when the deferred hope had caused the sick heart’s desire to pass away, that they have resolved for them also must be ‘a good time coming,’ if only they will have patience and ‘wait a little longer.’ Perhaps they look forward because they cannot bear to look back. Perhaps in such vague anticipations they try to delude their own consciousness, and fancy that by ignoring and refusing to see it they can escape the inevitable change. After all, this is the healthiest and most invigorating practice of the two. Something of courage seems wanting in man or beast when either is continually looking back. To the philosopher ‘a day that is dead’ has no value but for the lesson it affords; to the rest of mankind it is inestimably precious for the unaccountable reason that it can never come again.”