人生是由“渐”维持的。这在女人恐怕尤为必要：歌剧中，舞台上如花的少女，就是将来火炉旁边的老婆子，这句

参考答案:
Life is carried through by "gradualness". This "gradualness" is particularly crucial to woman, beautiful young ladies starring in an opera or stage show will someday end up becoming grannies moping their remaining years away around a fire. This may at first sound incredible and young ladies, may be reluctant to accept it as true. Fact is, however, all aged women you meet today have without exception "gradually" evolved from beautiful young ladies of yesterday.
It is also due to this "gradualness" the one is able to reconcile himself to his reduced circumstances. Fiction and reality abound with instances of a good-for-nothing young man from a wealthy family "gradually" ruining his family by repeated business failures and becoming in turn a poor wretch, a hired labourer, a slave, a rogue, a pauper and a thief... Since it is a process of "gradual" change covering, say, ten to twenty years, he doesn’t experience any terrible emotional shock at all.