No boy can resist
being fed well by a good-natured and still handsome woman. Boys are
very like nice dogs in this respect- give them a bone and they will
like you at once. Alethea employed every other little artifice which
she thought likely to win their allegiance to herself, and through
this their countenance for her nephew. She found the football club
in a slight money difficulty and at once gave half a sovereign towards
its removal. The boys had no chance against her, she shot them down
one after another as easily as though they had been roosting
pheasants. Nor did she escape scathless herself, for, as she wrote
to me, she quite lost her heart to half a dozen of them. "How much
nicer they are," she said, "and how much more they know than those who
profess to teach them!"
I believe it has been lately maintained that it is the young and
fair who are the truly old and truly experienced, inasmuch as it is
they who alone have a living memory to guide them; "the whole
charm," it has been said, "of youth lies in its advantage over age
in respect of experience, and when this has for some reason failed
or been misapplied, the charm is broken. When we say that we are
getting old, we should say rather that we are getting new or young,
and are suffering from inexperience; trying to do things which we have
never done before, and failing worse and worse, till in the end we are
landed in the utter impotence of death.
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