Perhaps with that expansion youth will finally effect a reconciliation with life of those two supremest and most poignant of adventures: the thoughts that cluster around sex, and the fears and hopes that cluster around death, the one the gateway into life, the other out of it. Youth finds them the two hardest aspects of life to adjust with the rest of the world in which we live. They are ever-present and pervasive, and yet their manifestations always cause us surprise, and shock us as of something unwonted intruding in our daily affairs. They are the unseen spectres behind life, of which we are always dimly conscious, but which we are always afraid to meet boldly and face to face. We speak of them furtively, or in far-away poetical strains. They are the materials for the tragedies of life, of its pathos and wistfulness, of its splendors and defeats. Yet they are treated always with an incorrigible and dishonest delicacy. The world, youth soon finds, is a much less orderly and refined place than would appear on the surface of our daily intercourse and words. As we put on our best clothes to appear in public, so the world puts on its best clothes to appear in talk and print. Men ignore death, as if they were quite unconscious that it would sometime come to them, yet who knows how many pensive or terrible moments the thought gives them? But the spectre is quite invisible to us. Or if they have passions, and respond as sensitively as a vibrating string to sex influences and appeals, we have little indication of that throbbing life behind the impenetrable veil of their countenances. We can know what people think about all other things, even what they think about God, but what they think of these two adventures of sex and death we never know. It is not so much, I am willing to believe, shame or fear that keeps us from making a parade of them, as awe and wonder and baffled endeavors to get our attitude towards them into expressible form. They are too elemental, too vast and overpowering in their workings to fit neatly into this busy, accounted-for, and tied-down world of daily life. They are superfluous to what we see as the higher meanings of this our life, and irritate us by their clamorous insistence and disregard for the main currents of our living. They seem irrelevant to life; or rather they overtop its bounty. Their pressure to be let in is offensive, and taints and mars irrevocably what would otherwise be so pleasant and secure a life. That is, perhaps, why we call manifestations of sex activity, obscene, and of death, morbid and ghastly.