Michael Malone - Weebly

a wife was, to Prudence Lattice's grief, no troublesome
realization of his twilight years. That life would have
been truer had he taken a male lover was (despite
Walter Saar's disbelief) not an insight that had ever
once crossed the rector's mind.
He delighted in the company of young men because
he persisted in his own delighted young manhood.
Sloan Highwick's sanguinity derived from his
lifelong incapacity for self-reflection. It is, as the gloomy
John Stuart Mill noted, our brains that make us
miserable. Of course, lacking inner resources,
Highwick's mood depended upon continual stimulation
from others.
But that, given his calling and his character and his
luck, he had never had difficulty obtaining. As a child he
had once been read a story about a handsome rabbit
who was the favorite of all the animals in the forest until
one day a new, even more dazzling rabbit arrived,
causing the first to be promptly dropped by his
admirers. To this lesson on the slippery wheel of
fortune, little Sloan's response had been to ask, "Why
didn't the first rabbit just get a bunch of new friends?"