Complete. From “Ourselves and Our Neighbors.”

THE LINE of demarcation between “eligibles” and “detrimentals” is not so sharply drawn in America as in England, for the very good reason that the “detrimental” of this year is quite likely to become the “eligible” of the next. In England a younger son who has no fortune of his own, and who has manifested no remarkable genius in any direction, is considered decidedly a “detrimental.” He is an alarming neighbor, at whose approach all wise mammas gather in their pretty daughters as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, unless, indeed, he be the younger son of a noble house. In that case his good blood and good breeding have a decided market value in certain directions, and the father of many a pretty girl will be glad to pay for them a large part of the fortune he himself has made in brewing or baking.

  In America what is most in demand is capacity. Most American fathers value the evident capacity to succeed in business and to make a fortune quite as highly as they do an inherited competence; and the young man who has shown that he can get on and who has already made for himself a place is not regarded as a “detrimental.” In the Eastern States, at least, where in Massachusetts alone there are thirty thousand more women than men, the position of a prosperous and unmarried young man is a very pleasant one. He is as welcome everywhere as flowers are in January.

  He is a joy forever, whether he is a thing of beauty or not; and if he is handsome and distinguished looking, his life is as surrounded by pleasant things, and he is as much sought and courted as any pretty girl of them all. He is in request for parties, he must lead the german, and beauty wears for him her brightest smiles and her prettiest gowns.

  This is his danger. The mocking bird, who sings every other bird’s song so well, has no song of its own; and the fine young man who suns himself in so many smiles now and then forgets to choose, and finds himself, before he knows it, getting to be an old beau, with the habit of society upon him and the habit of home unformed. The handsome and prosperous young man in society is perhaps the happiest of human creatures. He is better off than his pretty sister, because he has the privilege of choice, and, like the prince in the fairy story, can say “Come thou along with me” to whomever he will. But I believe that for the young man of society to become an old beau is just as sad a thing as for the prettiest rosebud to feel that she is overblown.

  The perception of his lessening social value is longer in coming to him, no doubt; but he sees it, at last, in the inattentive glance that roves beyond him when he comes nigh the beauty of the season; in the occasional omission of his name from a party of young people; even in the greater freedom with which girls are confided to his care, as if he were no longer dangerous. Then is his soul filled with bitterness, and he begins to say to himself that the seasons have grown cold, and his heart is lonely.

  Perhaps he honestly tries to fall in love and finds it impossible; and that is a far more pathetic thing than even to love in vain. To have flitted so long from flower to flower, that rose and lily and pink have each an equal charm, and not one can hold his fancy more than another, that is a sad fate for a bee who should long ago have begun to store up honey for his life’s winter.

  The old beau looks about him and sees his contemporaries buying houses and leading their children by the hand, and he scoffs a little perhaps, and tries to think that he is glad not thus to be bored and burdened. But his laughter is hollow, and when he goes home at night and sits before his lonesome fire, he sees in the firelight glow the long-lost Spanish castle, of which he threw away the key in his youth, and fancies what might have been if youth had but known.

  “Is there any moral to that?” asks the sauciest young voice over my shoulder; and I am awake again, for I too had begun to dream.

  Yes, my infant, a moral there is. Roses belong to June, and you cannot gather them under the skies of November.

  Since I believe a happy domestic life to be this world’s best gift, I do not believe that the old beau can have the best of life, unless by some rare chance he find the four-leaved clover of luck and love growing out of season and gather it. But if he is contented to wear his bachelor’s button frankly and easily, and take the goods the gods still provide him, he may yet be a very agreeable member of society. The man who at fifty believes himself to be twenty-five is as incongruous and uncomfortable a spectacle as the woman who at forty appears to have forgotten that she is more than eighteen; but there is nothing undignified in the position of the spinster who has frankly accepted her single life, or of the bachelor who takes his middle-aged pleasures cheerfully, and no longer aspires to lead the german or to break hearts, I have one such example in my mind, and with—

  He likes his game of whist, and he is a winning and delightful partner to the women who are old enough to play well,—winning in a double sense of the word. He is full of pleasant surprises for his acquaintances; he gives the most charming of little parties; he takes one friend for a drive; he finds a long-sought book for another; he always manages to do the right thing at the right time. I have even known him to chance to bring the loveliest hothouse flowers to a country dinner party in December, and thus enchant the hostess who was grieving over the nonfulfillment of her own order to a city florist. He has the supreme good fortune to know how to make himself agreeable; and, instead of pitying him because his fireside is lonely, his friends are selfishly a little rejoiced at it because they can, by reason of that loneliness, lure him more frequently to their own.

  But I am speaking of a very rare man,—scholar and gentleman, the very pink of courtesy and a fellow of infinite jest. To be all this, and therefore perennially acceptable, would scarcely be so easy of achievement to most men as to marry, and thus secure for themselves a family circle, of which, as Artemus Ward observed, they may be “it, principally.”

  It must be an exceptionally fine man, or an exceptionally charming and attractive woman, who can pass middle age unmarried and escape that flippant pity, that toleration consciously kind, which wounds while it strives to heal. But the world is gentler to our misfortunes than to our follies; and Dr. Holmes laughed his cynical and yet not ungenial laugh at his maiden aunt, not because her curls were wintry, but because she twined them still “in such a spring-like way.” To be a young bachelor in society is to be the king of the hour, and to hold the cup of life to one’s lips bubbling with pleasure and beaded with success; to be an old beau—an elderly man about town—is to have drunk off the bubbles, indeed, and to have reached the dregs. But if, instead of an old beau, a man elects to step aside from the ranks of those who wait on woman’s favor to be the friend of his peers, the counselor of the young fellows who come after him, the faithful knight in whom all womanhood finds its champion,—to him the world is full of noble uses and serene joys; and if he has missed the keenest bliss of youth, he may possess the noblest serenity of age, and at least rejoice that what he has never won he cannot lose.