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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: pay the price in a sufficient "amount of what you call life,"
why then, indeed, whether with wife or comrade, you may have
months and even years of such easy, natural, pleasurable, and
yet improving intercourse as shall make time a moment and
kindness a delight.
The secret of his retirement lies not in misanthropy, of
which he had no tincture, but part in his engrossing design
of self-improvement and part in the real deficiencies of
social intercourse. He was not so much difficult about his
fellow human beings as he could not tolerate the terms of
their association. He could take to a man for any genuine
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