"I don't choose to take it back," said he. "You'll humiliate me if you refuse to go to Edinburgh in my car—with a competent chaperon, of course."
"A chaperon! My gracious!" I couldn't help laughing. "Aren't you chaperon enough—a great big, grown-up man?"
"I suppose you think me very old," said he; "and so I am, compared to you; but I'm afraid—no, I'm not afraid—to tell you the truth, I'm extremely glad that I haven't come yet to the chaperon age."
"What is the chaperon age for a man?" I inquired.
"Seventy."
"And you won't be that for a long time," I added dreamily, wondering how old he really was.
For an instant his eyes waked up thoroughly, and he looked as if he were in a fury; then he burst out laughing. But his brown face was rather red when he asked if I would mind mentioning my honest impression of his age.
I thought a minute, and then said that perhaps he might be—well, nearly thirty. He laughed again, and seemed relieved, but wanted to know if thirty struck me as old or young. I didn't know what to answer, not to be impolite, so I said presently that I had always thought of thirty as being the year when you were not middle-aged yet, though anything that happened to you after your thirtieth birthday couldn't matter. "Still," I went on, "you look young. Only, there's something important and decided about you, as if you must have been grown up for a long time."
"Not to deceive you, I'm thirty-four," he said. "Now, no doubt, you'll consider me a sort of Ancient Mariner. Perhaps that's all the better."
"Looking at you, I can't, even if it would be better," I had to confess. "You're so alive—so strong, so—almost violent. I can't somehow imagine that you've ever been younger, or that you can ever grow older."