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He does not seem to have taken undue credit to himself; there is no querulousness, or egotism, or senility in his letters, but a delightful tranquillity of spirit. His sister wrote to him that the Boston newspapers often had matter in his honor. "I am obliged to them," he wrote; "on the other hand, some of our papers here are endeavoring to disgrace me. I take no notice. My friends defend me.
It is a pity that our language has no other word to indicate that one has lived seventy, eighty, or ninety years, than the word "old"; for the word "old" carries with it implications of "senility" and decrepitude, which many merely chronologically "old" people very properly resent.
Frank was now a very old dog, having reached a stage of yapping senility, where he found his sole comfort in following the sun about the house and dozing in it, sometimes noisily dreaming of past adventures. These had been exclusively of a sentimental character, for Frank had never been the fighting dog his first owner had promised he would be.
Joan, like the spirit of spring, had come upon Palgrave at that time of his life when youth had left him and he had stood at the great crossroads, one leading down through a morass of self-indulgence to a hideous senility, the other leading up over the stones of sacrifice and service to a dignified usefulness.
And he would "soon be past football!" He was "thirty-four if a day!" It was the verge of senility! He was no longer worth five hundred pounds. Perhaps even now this jointed merchandise was only worth two hundred pounds!
History tells us that certain peoples, the Massagetae and others, used to kill their aged folk in order to spare them the miseries of senility. The fatal blow on the hoary skull was in their eyes an act of filial piety. The Necrophori have their share of these ancient barbarities. Full of days and henceforth useless, dragging out a weary existence, they mutually exterminate one another.
She went on being good to the old man with a most complete and unconscious self-denial read to him, wrote for him, walked and drove with him at his will and pleasure, which began to be marked with all the exacting caprice of senility. And the days, weeks, months slipped round again to golden September.
But the idea is absurd, and no man can seriously entertain it whom an inveterate scepticism has not smitten with the extreme of senility or idiotcy. There is far more evidence at Rome for the historic truth of Christianity than for the existence of Julius Cæsar or of Scipio, or of any of the great men whose existence no one ever takes it into his head to doubt.
The portals of the transept are of the period of Francis I., with flowing lines and ornate decorations "having passed the severity and ethical standards of maturity, and progressed well along the path to senility," as a vigorous Frenchman has put it.
There is, to my mind, something inhuman in senility, something crouching and atavistic; the human qualities seem to drop from old people insensibly day by day. The three of them made me feel uncomfortable with their gaunt silences, their bent carriage, their evident unfriendliness to me and to one another. And that night, perhaps, I was in the mood for uncomfortable impressions.
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