Either we are cold, or we are sentimental.

Either we are young, or growing old.

In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.

And why, if this--and much more than this is true, why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us--why indeed?
For the moment after we know nothing about him.
Such is the manner of our seeing.

Such the conditions of our love.
("I'm twenty-two.