But occasionally, now and again, one does meet an old man who will tell you the truth about himself, who will not try and dramatise his life, who will face the past as once he could face the future, with unbandaged eyes. Such a man I have the privilege to number among my friends. We meet casually, once or twice a month, in our club at lunch. And usually we sit together afterwards over our coffee and liqueurs. And in the summer we can watch from the terrace the grey water of the river moving sluggishly below us, bearing pleasure-boats, tramps, and steamers on its muddied surface, carrying them to sea or harbour. And we find it easy to talk there of the drift and hurry, the traffic and confusion of human life, and of that abiding rhythm that makes out of discord, harmony. He speaks always unassumingly, always confidently, as a man should who has achieved balance. “Life is still as entertaining to me,” he will say, “as surprising, as adventurous as it was thirty years ago. I am the spectator, and that is the only difference. I sit ‘quiet handed’ in the shadow and find the answer to much that, when I was young, puzzled me. “At sixty we cease to make love, if we are wise. _On fait voyeur_ and women lift their mask. It is our recompense for the loss of youth: this privilege of confidence.” He talks to me of his friends whom he has the leisure to observe and understand, and in particular of a certain lady who has flavoured the charm of youth with widowhood. “A man of my age,” he says, “may speak of all things, even of love, with complete propriety to a young and attractive person. And as I sit beside her in that softly-lighted drawing-room, in that dusk of lilac and lavender, with the sound of a woman’s voice about me, and before my eyes the loveliness of brown hair and hazel eyes and pouted mouth, and in my heart the knowledge that she could love, I reflect how once I should have been the prisoner of a single impulse, and I tell myself I am happier now, sitting there, listening while she lays bare her soul to me as thirty years ago she might have revealed her body. “‘It isn’t worth it, my dear Gerald,’ she will say; ‘really it isn’t worth it. There’s so little harmony, so much friction. We read of love at first sight, of people rushing into each other’s arms. But how often does that happen? Half the time we are trying to make a man who is indifferent fall in love with us, and the other half to get rid of a man who has begun to weary us. It’s always the same.’ “There is a pause, and she leans back against the high-heaped pile of cushions with a little sigh that is half-boredom and half-petulance.