Edward Bellamy

“ The long-continued effort to project themselves mentally into the period of old age was assisted in a startling manner by the illusion of the senses produced by the decrepit figures, the sallow and wrinkled faces, and the white heads of the group.
Their acting had become spontaneous. They were perplexed and bewildered as to their identity, and in a manner carried away by the illusion their own efforts had created. ”

“ Henry had said, meaning by “the old folks” their future selves.
It had been agreed that, in proper deference to the probabilities, one, at least, of the girls ought to illustrate the fat old lady. But they found it impossible to agree which should sacrifice herself, for no one of the three could, in her histrionic enthusiasm, quite forget her personal appearance. Nellie flatly refused to be made up fat, and Jessie as flatly, while both the girls had too much reverence for the sweet dignity of Mary Fellows's beauty to consent to her taking the part, and so the idea was given up. ”

“ Frank and George met a couple of times in Henry's room to smoke it over and settle details, and Henry called on Jessie to arrange several concerted features of the programme, and for some other reasons for aught I know.
As each one studied his or her part and strove in imagination to conceive how they would act and feel as old men and old women, they grew more interested, and more sensible of the mingled pathos and absurdity of the project, and its decided general effect of queerness. ”

“ A trait scarcely noticeable in youth tinges the whole man in age.”
“What striking dramatic effects are lost because the drama of life is spun out so long instead of having the ends brought together,” observed George. “The spectators lose the force of the contrasts because they forget the first part of every rôle before the latter part is reached. One fails in consequence to get a realizing sense of the sublime inconsistencies of every lifetime.”
“That difficulty is what we propose, in a small way, to remedy next Wednesday night,” replied Henry.
Mary professed some scruples. ”

“ Parting is sad, but I prefer to part from my friends while they are yet alive, that I may feel it less when they die. One must manage his feelings or they will get the better of him.”
“It is a singular sensation,” said George, “to outlive one's generation. One has at times a guilty sense of having deserted his comrades. It seems natural enough to outlive any one contemporary, but unnatural to survive them as a mass,—a sort of risky thing, fraught with the various vague embarrassments and undefined perils threatening one who is out of his proper place. ”

“ Remembering is dull business at best. I notice that most persons, even of eventful lives, prefer a good novel to the pleasures of recollection. It is really easier to sympathize with the people in a novel or drama than with our past selves. We lose a great source of recreation just because we can't recall the past more vividly.”
“How shockingly Henry contradicts to-night,” was the only reply Nellie deigned to this long speech.
“What shall we call each other next Wednesday?” asked Mary. ”

“ Henry's suggestion had set them all thinking, and the vein was so unfamiliar that they did not at once find much to say.
“I should think,” finally remarked George, “that such an old folks' party would afford a chance for some pretty careful study, and some rather good acting.”
“Fifty years will make us all not far from seventy. What shall we look like then, I wonder?” musingly asked Mary Fellows.
She was the demurest, dreamiest of the three girls; the most of a woman, and the least of a talker. ”

“ The reason they thought to be that the interests of age have contracted to about the same scope as those of childhood before it has expanded into maturity. The skein of life is drawn together to a point at the two ends and spread out in the middle. ”

“ The fragile tenure of the sense of personal identity is illustrated by the ease and completeness with which actors can put themselves in the place of the characters they assume, so that even their instinctive demeanor corresponds to the ideal, and their acting becomes nature. Such was the experience of the members of the club. ”

“ What we were, or shall be, or do, belongs strictly to the third person.”
“You would make sad work of grammar with that notion,” said Jessie, smiling.
“Grammar needs mending just there,” replied Henry. “The three persons of grammar are really not enough. A fourth is needed to distinguish the ego of the past and future from the present ego, which is the only true one.”
“Oh, you're getting altogether too deep for me,” said Jessie. “Come, girls, what in the world are we going to get to wear next Wednesday?” ”

“ In respect of age, as in so many other respects, the world lives on fiats, with equally little interest in or comprehension of the levels above or below them. And a surprising thing is that middle age is about as unable to recall and realize youth as to anticipate age. ”

“ But Henry remarked that Jessie might have gone further and said just as truly that none of them would survive fifty years, or even ten.
“We may, some of us, escape the pang of dying as long as that,” said he, “but that is but a trifle, and not a necessary incident of death. The essence of mortality is change, and we shall be changed. ”

“ And when we get old it will be just as hard to realize that we were ever young. So that the different periods of life are to all intents and purposes different persons, and the first person of grammar ought to be used only with the present tense. ”

“ The good Lord has made it so that at whichever end of life we are, the other end looks pretty uninteresting, and if it won't hurt your feelings to have somebody in the party who has got through all the troubles you have yet before you, I should be glad to come.' That was turning the tables for us pretty neatly, eh, girls? ”

“ They thought they noticed, too, that old people are more alike than middle-aged people. There is something of the same narrowness and similarity in the range of their tastes and feelings that is marked in children. ”

“ The girls, however, protested that this talk about growing so utterly away from each other was too dismal for anything, and they would n't believe it anyhow. The old-fashioned notions about eternal constancy were ever so much nicer. It gave them the cold shivers to hear Henry's ante-mortem dissection of their friendship, and that young man was finally forced to admit that the members of the club would probably prove exceptions to the general rule in such matters. It was agreed, therefore, that they should appear to know each other at the old folks' party. ”

“ The poets are young people who know nothing of how old folks feel, and argue only from their theory of the romantic fitness of things. I believe that reminiscence takes up a very small part of old persons' time. ”

“ The spectators were silent, looking first at the picture, and then at each other.
“Can it be,” said Frank, “that these were ever our pictures? I hope, Mrs. Tyrrell, the originals had the forethought to put the names on the back, that we may be able to identify them.”
“No,” said she, “we must guess as best we can. First, who is that?” ”

“ Now, for one, I 've no idea what sort of a fellow my old man will turn out. I don't believe people can generally tell much better what sort of old people will grow out of them than what characters their children will have. ”

“ They all set themselves to make a study of old age in a manner that had never occurred to them before, and never does occur to most people at all. Never before had their elderly friends received so much attention at their hands. ”

“ Jessie, being rather taller than the others, had affected the stoop of age very successfully. She wore a black dress spotted with white, and her whitened hair was arranged with a high comb. She was the only one without spectacles or eyeglasses. Henry looked older and feebler than any of the company. His scant hair hung in thin and long white locks, and his tall, slender figure had gained a still more meagre effect from his dress, while his shoulders were bowed in a marked stoop ”

“ Hyde?”
“Why, I was a member,” replied she briskly, “and so was Mrs. Tyrrell. We were reminded of it the other day by a discovery Mrs. Tyrrell made in an old bureau drawer of a photograph of the members of the club in a group, taken probably all of fifty years ago, and yellow as you can imagine. There was one figure that resembled you, doctor, as you might have looked then, and I thought, too, that I recalled you as one of the members; but Mrs. ”