Life, however, it must be owned, has come to rather an idle pass with me. Would my friends like to know what brought it thither?

There is one secret, — I have concealed it all along, and never meant to let the least whisper of it escape, — one foolish little secret, which possibly may have had something to do with these inactive years of meridian manhood, with my bachelorship, with the unsatisfied retrospect that I fling back on life, and my listless glance towards the future. Shall I reveal it? It is an absurd thing for a man in his afternoon, — a man of the world, moreover, with these three white hairs in his brown mustache and that deepening track of a crow’s-foot on each temple, — an absurd thing ever to have happened, and quite the absurdest for an old bachelor, like me, to talk about.