Tom took his pipe out of his mouth and blew away a cloud of blue smoke.
“I feel eighty-four,” he said. “Prosperity isn’t so soothing as I was led to believe. I think worrying and fighting would have kept me young. You are the only person who always remains twenty-five. How have you managed it?”
“Growing old is absolutely a matter of will,” said Manvers. “It is like Alice eating the mushroom to make her grow tall or short. You can eat which side of it you like: one side makes you old, the other keeps you young. No one need grow old unless he likes. The secret is to take nothing seriously. I only once took anything seriously, and it made me three years older in a single night. Consequently I am twenty-eight, not twenty-five.”
“I took Miss Wrexham seriously. I asked her to marry me. That was just three years ago.”
“Poor old boy! Why didn’t you tell me? Are you going to try your fate again? She is coming down here in a week.”
“The deuce she is! No; the incident is closed.”
“I found everything distasteful for a time, but I recovered. Life is so amusingly improbable. Fancy my doing that sort of thing! However, it was very useful; I learned several lessons.”
“I learned that nothing can really damage one’s capacity for enjoyment. Don’t think I wasn’t in earnest about it; I was in deadly earnest. The second was that _homme propose_. It is a truism, of course, but it is useful to find by experience that a truism is true. I have yet to learn who disposes,” he added. “I must say I have never personally experienced the last part of the proverb. By the way, I was talking to an old model the other day who was sitting to me for my ‘Fourth Act’--the thing of the woman with the fan--and she said, ‘Man appoints, God disappoints.’ But woman usually disappoints. And the third thing I learned was that the most foolish thing in the world is to be serious. While one can certainly amuse one’s self it is idle to forego that bird in the hand for a problematic bird in the bush.”
“I wish I could learn one thing a year,” said Tom, “as you have been doing. I should be getting confoundedly wise by now.”
“You always used to be learning things,” remarked the other. “I remember you used to discover the secret of life about every other day.”