And having done all
this, he ordered his horses, and before noon was on his first stage.
It was his birthday. He had completed his twenty-third year. This was
sufficient, even if he had no other inducement, to make him indulge in
some slight reflection. These annual summings up are awkward things,
even to the prosperous and the happy, but to those who are the reverse,
who are discontented with themselves, and find that youth melting away
which they believe can alone achieve anything, I think a birthday is
about the most gloomy four-and-twenty hours that ever flap their damp
dull wings over melancholy man.
Yet the Duke of St. James was rather thoughtful than melancholy. His
life had been too active of late to allow him to indulge much in that
passive mood. 'I may never know what happiness is,' thought his Grace,
as he leaned back in his whirling britzska, 'but I think I know what
happiness is not. It is not the career which I have hitherto pursued.
All this excitement which they talk of so much wears out the mind,
and, I begin to believe, even the body, for certainly my energies
seem deserting me.
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