The Cords of Vanity

I was quite contented now and assured as to the future. I foreknew the future would be tranquil and lacking in any particular excitement, and I had already ceded, in anticipation, the last tittle of mastery over my own actions; but Bettie would keep me to the mark, would wring -- not painlessly perhaps -- from Robert Townsend the very best there was in him; and it would be this best which, unalloyed, would endure, in what I wrote. I had never imagined that, for the ore, smelting was an agreeable process; so I shrugged, and faced my future contentedly.

One day I said, "Tomorrow I must have holiday. There are certain things that need burying, Bettie dear, and -- it is just the funeral of my youth I want to go to."