“My dear,” said this tactful woman, “if you are ‘built’ as I am, you must find that chair desperately uncomfortable without a cushion behind you! I simply will not sit in it without this little bit of a pillow wedged in at the small of my back. I find it so much more comfortable so, that I am sure you will.”
And the cushion was adjusted. Could even supersensitive and suspicious Old Age have resented such attention?
Of course elderly people like to talk. Why should they not be allowed to do it? The boy or girl listener is impatient of what he or she terms inwardly “garrulousness.” Is not the prattle of youth as trying to old people? But, to do them justice, unless they are very crabbed, they listen to it kindly.
Unfortunately, one seldom sees a young person rise and remain standing when an old person enters the room. Yet to loll back in a chair under such circumstances is one of the greatest rudenesses of which a girl or boy is capable.
THE OLD MAN
GENEROSITY TO AGE
Right here, may I put in a plea for the old man? In the first place, he is not so popular as the old woman. She is often beloved; he, poor soul! is too often endured. In very truth he is not so lovable as his lady-wife. He did not take the time while he was young to cultivate the little niceties of life as she did. Women have more regard for appearances than men have, and their life is not spent so often in counting-room and office; they are, in their daily life, surrounded by refined persons more than are their husbands; they do not have to talk by the hour with rough men, give orders to surly underlings, eat at lunch counters, and join in the morning and evening rush-for-life to get a seat in the crowded car or train where the law is “Sauve qui peut!” or, in brutal English “Every man for himself”—no matter who—“for the hindmost!” All these things, after years and years, influence the man or woman. It is inevitable. It even affects the inner life. The Book of books tells us that though the outward man perish, the inward man is renewed day by day. Sometimes the inward man is hardly worth renewing at the end of a life of such rush and mad haste after the elusive dollar that there has been no place for the gentle amenities of existence. Therefore, as the man gets old, his nature comes to the front, and, too often, the courtesies that were pinned on him by a loving wife, and kept polished up by her, drop off and he does not want to bother to have them readjusted. Consequently, he often has habits that are not pretty. He is irascible; he is intolerant with youth, and, now that he is laid aside, he likes to tell of what he did when he was as active as the young men about him. Dear young people, let him talk! Listen to him, and remember that at your age he was just as agreeable as you. Consider, too, that if, when you are old, you would escape being the self-absorbed being you think him, you would do well now to begin to avoid the selfishness and self-absorption that you find make the old man objectionable. Practise on him, and he will in his old age still be doing a good work.
A WORD TO THE WISE
It is not pleasant to feel old, to know that you are set aside in the minds of others as “a has-been.” There are few more cruel lessons given to human beings to learn in this hard school we call life. And this task has to be learned when strength and courage wane, and the grasshopper is a burden. If young people would only make it unnecessary for the older person to acquire it! It lies with youth to make the declining years of those near the end of the journey a weary waiting for that end, or a peaceful loitering on a road that shall be a foretaste of a Land in which no one ever grows old.