NOTHING makes one feel so old as to wake up suddenly, as it were, and realize that the conditions of life have changed, and that the standards you knew and accepted in your youth have been raised or lowered.The young men you meet have somehow become uncomfortably polite, offering you armchairs in the club, and listening with a shade of deference to your stories.They are of another generation; their ways are not your ways, nor their ambitions those you had in younger days.One is tempted to look a little closer, to analyze what the change is, in what this subtle difference consists, which you feel between your past and their present.You are surprised and a little angry to discover that, among other things, young men have better manners than were general among the youths of fifteen years ago.
Anyone over forty can remember three epochs in men's manners.When I was a very young man, there were still going about in society a number of gentlemen belonging to what was reverently called the "old school," who had evidently taken Sir Charles Grandison as their model, read Lord Chesterfield's letters to his son with attention, and been brought up to commence letters to their fathers, "Honored Parent," signing themselves "Your humble servant and respectful son." There are a few such old gentlemen still to be found in the more conservative clubs, where certain windows are tacitly abandoned to these elegant-mannered fossils.They are quite harmless unless you happen to find them in a reminiscent mood, when they are apt to be a little tiresome; it takes their rusty mental machinery so long to get working! Washington possesses a particularly fine collection among the retired army and navy officers and ex-officials.It is a fact well known that no one drawing a pension ever dies.