The Silent Isle by A.C. Benson

There has been staying with me for the last few days a perfectly delightful person; an old man he is nearly eighty who is exactly what an old man ought to be, and what one would desire to be if one were to grow old. Old people are not as a rule a very encouraging spectacle. One is apt to feel, after seeing old people, that it is rather a tragic thing when life outruns activity, and to hope that one may never have the misery of octogenarianism. Sometimes they are peevish and ill-at-ease, disagreeably afflicted and obviously broken; and even when they bear their affliction bravely and courageously, it is a melancholy business. It seems a sad kind of spitefulness in nature that persons should have so much trouble to bear when they are tired and faint-hearted and only wish for repose.

One feels then that it ought to be somehow arranged that people should have their share of trouble in youth or manhood, when trouble is not wholly uninteresting, and when there is even a sort of grim pleasure in fighting it; but when it comes to having no distractions, to being obliged to sit still and suffer with no hope of alleviation; when affection dies down like an expiring flame, and the failing nature seems involved in a helpless sort of selfishness, planning for little comforts, enjoying tiny pleasures with a sort of childlike greediness, it is a very pitiful thing, I remember an old lady who lived with her son in a small parsonage full of boisterous children. They were very good to her, but she was sadly in the way. She herself had lost almost all interest in life; she was deaf and infirm and cross.