“Let us consider to a moment. You will go back to youth. You will be young again. Perhaps you have forgotten what it is to be young. Let me remind you.” The man’s lashes met; his voice seemed to come from a great distance. “It is to be filled with the very ecstasy of living,” he breathed--“its impulses, its fevers, the things that have always belonged to youth, that have always made youth beautiful. Your experience? Yes, you will have that, too; but it will not be the experience of that same youth, but of another--the youth that you were.” The gray eyes gleamed, the voice hardened a little. “Did you ever profit by the experience of another in that earlier time?” Carringford shook his head. “No,” he whispered. His guest pointed to the book-shelves. “Did you ever, in a later time, profit by the wisdom set down in those?” Carringford shook his head. “No,” he whispered. “Yet the story is all there, and you knew the record to be true. Have you always profited even by your own experience? Have you always avoided the same blunder a second, even a third, time? Do you always profit by your own experience even now?” Carringford shook his head. “No,” he whispered. “And yet you think that if you could only live your life over, you would avoid the pitfalls and the temptations, remembering what they had cost you before. No, oh, no; I am not here to promise you that. I am not a magician; I am only a scientist, and I have not yet discovered the elixir of wisdom or of morals. I am not superhuman; I am only human, like yourself. I am not a god, and I cannot make you one. Going back to youth means that you will be young again--young! Don’t you see? It does not mean that you will drag back with you the strength and the wisdom and the sobered impulses of middle age. That would not be youth. Youth cares nothing for such things, and profits by no experience, not even its own.” Carringford’s eyes had wandered to the yellow vial under the lamp--to the quivering, shimmering fascination of its dancing gold. His gaze rested there a moment, then again sought the face of his guest--that inscrutable face where seemed mingled the look of middle age with the wisdom of the centuries. “You do not care to go back further?” Carringford said. The man’s eyes closed for a moment, and something that was akin to fierce human emotion swept his features.