“True it is that sickness may assail us and that old age and death will by no means be baulked of their prey, yet youth is youth and beauty divine, and the man who turns his back on pleasure because it passes is a coward. Indeed the rose is the sweeter because even in blooming it treads the way of death and soon we see it no more. Truly, my Prince, you are afflicted with a distempered mind. Acquiescence is the secret of life. We who are wise know that these things must be, and even old age and death, the conquerors, we take to enhance our pleasures, saying to ourselves, ‘The moment is mine, and love is sweet and lust the spur of life. This moment neither death nor old age can take from me. I will spend it as a man would spend his all if he knew that next day he would be plundered, and a beggar.’” But Siddhartha was silent, with brooding eyes fixed on the ground, and presently Udayi resumed, in a delicately modulated voice: “While you believed that joy and beauty were eternal, and that ages hence these women would still surround you, beautiful and yielding, then you might well shrink from a delight too prolonged, for dropped honey cloys. An eternity of love may well become hell. Was it not so, my Prince.” And slowly the Prince answered: “It was so. I have looked on the racing river, swollen with melting snows, thinking that, were any end possible, to be hurled beaten and broken down the rocks in its mad hurry were better than the changeless Paradise of love and soft words and swooning music. There you are right, Udayi the smooth-tongued. This is true.” And highly satisfied, Udayi resumed: “And now, having learnt that there _is_ an end, what should be your course? The pleasures of a prisoner released, who enjoys knowing that he has a respite though the doors will shut upon him one day. Surely it is not the part of a brave man to fling away what he has because he cannot have all, nor to own himself conquered because one day he must face the enemy whom as yet he has not seen. No—not so. Take what the Gods send—the Gods who have themselves been amenable to beauty and docile in the arms of loveliness. Indeed what choice is there but to slink through life starting at every shadow, or to dice and drink and love, like a man tasting the best while it lasts. For what comes after we cannot tell. Who knows?” And the Prince said: