"Mental Efficiency And Other Hints to Men and Women"

The faculty that we chiefly need when we are in the resolution-making mood is the faculty of imagination, the faculty of looking at our lives as though we had never looked at them before -- freshly, with a new eye.

Supposing that you had been born mature and full of experience, and that yesterday had been the first day of your life, you would regard it to-day as an experiment, you would challenge each act in it, and you would probably arrange to-morrow in a manner that showed a healthy disrespect for yesterday. You certainly would not say: I have done so-and-so once; therefore I must keep on doing it." The past is never more than an experiment.

A genuine appreciation of this fact will make our new Resolutions more valuable and drastic than they usually are. I have a dim notion that the most useful Resolution for most of us would be to break quite fifty per cent, of all the vows we have ever made. Do not accustom yourself to enchain your volatility with vows. . . . Take this warning; it is of great importance." (The wisdom is Johnson's, but I flatter myself on the italics.)

SETTLING DOWN IN LIFE

IV

SETTLING DOWN IN LIFE

THE other day a well-known English novelist asked me how old I thought she was, really. Well," I said to myself, " since she has asked for it, she shall have it; I will be as true to life as her novels." So I replied audaciously: Thirty-eight." I fancied I was erring if at all, on the side of really," and I trembled.

She laughed triumphantly. " I am forty-three," she said. The incident might have passed off entirely to my satisfaction had she not proceeded: And now tell me how old you are." That was like a woman.

Women imagine that men have no reticences, no pretty little vanities. What an error! Of course I could not be beaten in candor by a woman. I had to offer myself a burnt sacrifice to her curiosity, and I did it, bravely but not unflinchingly. And then afterwards the fact of my age remained with me, worried me, obsessed me.

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