There are fatuous folk who, having become successful and lost their digestions, look back on their far youth, and talk, saying that their early days, despite miseries and hardships, were really, now they regard them dispassionately, the happiest of their lives. That is a lie. And everybody, even he who says it, secretly knows it to be a lie. Youth is not glorious; it is shamefaced. It is a time of self-searching and self-exacerbation. It is a horrible experience which everybody is glad to forget, and which nobody ever wants to repeat. It knows no zest. It is a time of spiritual unrest, a chafing of the soul. Youth is cruel, troubled, sensitive to futilities. Only childhood and middle-age can be light-hearted about life: childhood because it doesn't understand, middle-age because it does. And a youth of poverty is, literally, hell. There is a canting phrase in England to the effect that poverty is nothing to be ashamed of. Yet if there is one country in the world where poverty is a thing to be superlatively ashamed of, that country is England. There never was an Englishman who wasn't ashamed of being poor. I myself had a youth of hardship and battle: a youth in which I invaded the delectable countries of Literature and Music, and lived sometimes ecstatically on a plane many degrees above everyday life, and--was hungry. Now, looking back, when I have, at any rate, enough to live upon and can procure anything I want within reason; though I am no longer enthusiastic about Art or Music or Letters, and have lost the sharp palate I had for these things; yet, looking back, I know that those were utterly miserable days, and that right now I am having the happiest time of my life. For, though I don't very much want books and opera and etchings and wines and liqueurs--still, if I want them I can have them at any moment. And that sense of security is worth more than a thousand of the temperamental ecstasies and agonies that are the appanage of hard-up youth.