Now there are those who will urge that boy nature cannot be altered, that it is natural for a boy to worship games, and that you cannot expect him to be otherwise. But that I shall never believe is so. For myself, I know that I play cricket and football as keenly as I did seven years ago, that I spend a great many evenings with a Wisden in my hands; but that I manage to get through a fair amount of work between each January and December. That is not in itself a fair argument. One cannot arraign the enthusiasms of sixteen before the enthusiasms of twenty-three any more than one can arraign the enthusiasms of twenty-three before those of forty. There is no more fallacious argument than the 'when you have reached my age, young man.' At different stages of our life we are vexed by different problems. At twenty-three our sexual life is of vast importance; it stretches before us, a wide field for courage, enterprise, adventure. In the man of forty, curiosity has been satisfied. He has settled many of the problems that perplexed him when he was a young man. And he says: 'My dear fellow, all this that is worrying you does not really matter.' But he is wrong. It does matter to a young man of twenty. And nothing is trivial that has ever exercised deeply the human spirit. In a world that is in flux the permanence or impermanence of any emotion is of less matter than its intensity while it lasts. Sooner or later everything must desert us. Is the brain a useless possession because it will one day soften. Are teeth less efficacious now because one day they will decay. Is a young man of twenty going to listen to the impotent man of sixty who mutters: 'Young man, the charms of woman are a snare and an illusion. When you have reached my age you will be no longer moved by them.' For that is where the 'when you are my age, young man,' argument finally lands us. And it is not fair to say to a boy of seventeen: 'This mad excitement about games is absurd. In six years even you will have outgrown it.' It is for us to decide whether this mad excitement is the natural expression of a boy's temperament, or whether it is the peculiar growth of a peculiar environment.