Page:The Yellow Book - 06.djvu/90

 playing golf. The fault is not his, of course; the honest heart of him beats sound as ever. The real culprits are these defaulting writers, who, tainted by realism, basely shirk their duty, fall away from the high standard of former days, and endeavour to represent things as they possibly might have happened. Nineteen to six, indeed! No lad of spirit will put up with this sort of thing. He will even rather play golf; and play golf he consequently does.

The magnificent demand of youth for odds—long odds, whatever the cost!—has a pathetic side to it, once one is in a position to look back, thereon squinting gloomily through the wrong end of the telescope. At the age of six or seven, the boy (in the person of his hero of the hour) can take on a Genie, an Afreet or two, a few Sultans and a couple of hostile armies, with a calmness resembling indifference. At twelve he is already less exacting. Three hundred naked Redskins, mounted on mustangs and yelling like devils, pursue him across the prairie and completely satisfy his more modest wants. At fifteen, 'tis enough if he may only lay his frigate alongside of two French ships of the line; and among the swords he shall subsequently receive on his quarter-deck he will not look for more than one Admiral's; while a year or two later it suffices if he can but win fame and fortune at twenty-five, and marry the Earl's daughter in the face of a whole competitive House of Lords. Henceforward all is declension. One really has not the heart to follow him, step by dreary step, to the time when he realises that a hero may think himself lucky if he can only hold his own, and so on to the point when it dawns on him at last that the gods have a nasty habit of turning the trump, and have even been accused of playing with loaded dice—an aphorism any honest boy would laugh to scorn.

Indeed, the boy may well be excused for rejecting with indignation these unworthy sneers at the bona fides of the autocrats who, from