"If they're not afraid of death, what are they afraid of?" he found himself thinking.
He himself in his youth had never thought about dying—except sometimes in church in connection with music and crowns and glassy seas. Then once, when he was only a little younger than David, he had been very ill in the school infirmary; another boy had died, and then, he remembered, he did for the first time consider the possibility of his, Walter Brougham's, coming to an end, stopping, going out perhaps like a candle. It had been an uncomfortable experience, and when his mother had come to take care of him he had distinctly clung to her—as if she could have done any good. Had these boys gone through that and come out on the other side? He found it alarmed him to think that David wasn't afraid.
Good heavens, what would they do—this new generation, young and healthy and unafraid of death, not because they had never thought about it but because they had been familiar with it since they went into long trousers?
Mr. Granby broke the silence. He said: "To order ourselves lowly and reverently to all our betters?"
Brougham was puzzled by these words, and he felt that it was no time for puzzling him.
"Did you think David was impertinent to me, Mr. Granby?" he asked. "Is that what you meant?"
"No, that isn't what I meant, Mr. Brougham."
Brougham didn't inquire any further. He shook his head and went home. He found his wife and David sitting hand in hand on the piazza looking out to sea, with the same blank grave look on both their faces. Yet they were thinking very different thoughts.
Mrs. Brougham was thinking that she had been strangely stupid not to know that this was just exactly the way David would do it; but she added to herself she had allowed her vision to be clouded by her husband.
David was carefully reviewing the small stock of his technical knowledge of aëroplanes.