Although Gran'pa had told her the exciting story of his rejuvenation, every now and again I caught her looking at him as if she were not quite certain of his identity. It must have been strange for her to see the twenty-five-years-older-than-herself lover of fifty years ago sitting there, the very embodiment of a vigorous man of only forty-five. . . . But, to me, it was stranger still to think of Gran'pa as a lovesick swain. After a man or woman has reached middle age, it is absurd for them to delude themselves that they are still "in love." Affection, tolerance, understanding, sympathy, friendship—any of these lukewarm expressions may be applicable; but the hot, consuming fire of youth seeking youth—no! And yet . . . there was Gran'pa, his eyes shining with passionate devotion, his hand trembling as he passed his loved one the cruet, and his voice unsteady and caressing when he spoke to her.
"Would you believe it," he said, suddenly turning to me, "Sally hasn't a single unsound tooth in her head!"
"Sally" blushed as prettily as a maiden of sixteen—and I mumbled something intended to express amazement, without laying undue emphasis on her great age.
In these degenerate days of artificial denture and gold fillings it was an accomplishment of which she might well be proud. Even immature Molly possessed a crowned tooth—as the result of an encounter with a golf ball—and as for Gran'pa himself. . . . Well, he hadn't (and couldn't have) suffered from toothache for over thirty years.
"That's the result of care, George," said Gran'pa, drifting into one of his lecturing moods. "Attend to your health when young and you get your reward with compound interest when you're . . . er, that is, later on in life," he added, tactfully. "What'll happen to the modern cake-and-chocolate eating flapper of to-day when she's seventy or eighty, I should like to know? . . ."
He continued in this vein for some time, until at last Sally Rebecca interrupted him by saying that she thought Molly was adorable—and Molly glanced at me through the corner of her eyes, closed the nearest, and then gently kicked me under the table.
"Present company excepted, of course," said Gran'pa, a trifle embarrassed.
"Ah!" laughed his guest. "You're the same as ever, Charles."
It sounded very peculiar to find her addressing him by his Christian name. I had never heard it used before. To me he had always been "Gran'pa"—the synonym for a sort of impersonal unit of the vague species Ancestor—and not to hear him referred to as such seemed to bring him down from his lofty pedestal and make him too human and ordinary. I could no more picture him as somebody's "Charles," or "Charlie," than I could visualize the King of England in pajamas. Some things are so homely that they seem disrespectful. Gran'pa as "Charles" was one of them.
The visit ended in Gran'pa's seeing Sally Rebecca home in a taxi—and returning two hours later!