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Few persons live through the first periods of manhood without strong
temptations to be counted "men of the world." The idea looms grandly
among those vanities that hedge a man's approach to maturity.
Clarence is in good training for the acceptance of this idea. The broken
hope, which clouded his closing youth, shoots over its influence upon
the dawn of manhood. Mortified pride had taught--as it always
teaches--not caution only, but doubt, distrust, indifference. A new
pride grows up on the ruins of the old, weak, and vain pride of youth.
Then it was a pride of learning, or of affection; now it is a pride of
indifference. Then the world proved bleak and cold, as contrasted with
his shining dreams; and now he accepts the proof, and wins from it what
he can.
The man of the world puts on the method and measure of the world: he
studies its humors. He gives up the boyish notion of a sincerity among
men like that of youth: he lives to seem. He conquers such annoyances as
the world may thrust upon him, in the shape of grief or losses, like a
practical athlete of the ring. He studies moral sparring.
With somewhat of this strange vanity growing on you, you do not suffer
the heart to wake into life except in such fanciful dreams as tempt you
back to the sunny slopes of childhood.
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