Page:The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, a Book for an Idle Holiday - Jerome (1886).djvu/70

 creeps like a killing frost upon our hearts. The tender shoots and the expanding flowers are nipped and withered, and, of a vine that yearned to stretch its tendrils round the world, there is left but a sapless stump.

My fair friends will deem all this rank heresy, I know. So far from a man's not loving after he has passed boyhood, it is not till there is a good deal of grey in his hair that they think his protestations at all worthy of attention. Young ladies take their notions of our sex from the novels written by their own, and, compared with the monstrosities that masquerade for men in the pages of that nightmare literature, Pythagoras's plucked bird and Frankenstein's demon were fair average specimens of humanity. In these so-called books, the chief lover, or Greek god, as he is admiringly referred to—by the way, they do not say which "Greek god" it is that the gentleman bears such a striking likeness to, it might be hump-backed Vulcan, or double-faced Janus, or even drivelling Silenus, the god of abstruse mysteries. He resembles the whole family of them, however, in being a blackguard, and perhaps this is what is meant. To even the little manliness his classical prototypes possessed, though, he can lay no claim whatever, being a listless effeminate noodle, on the shady side of forty. But oh! the depth and strength of this elderly party's emotion for some bread and butter