But the centre of the world contains all things and when one is at the beginning of life and sees them for the first time they assume strange proportions.

It enters a room, it talks lightly or sweetly, it whirls about in an airy dance, this pretty untested thing; and, among those for whom the belief in the reality of strange proportions has modified itself through long experience, only those of the thinking habit realise that at any moment the testing--the marking with deep scores may begin or has perhaps begun already.

At eighteen or twenty a fluctuation of flower-petal tint which may mean an imperfect night can signify no really important cause.

What could eighteen or twenty have found to think about in night watches?
But in its centre of the world as it stands on the stage with the curtain rolling up, those who have lived longer--so very long--are only the dim audience sitting in the shadowy auditorium looking on at passionately real life with which they have really nothing whatever to do, because what they have seen is past and what they have learned has lost its importance and meaning with the changing of the years.

The lying awake and tossing on pillows--if lying awake there is--has its cause in _real_ joys--or griefs--not in things atrophied by time.