“But you wouldn’t be,” Avery objected, “if you thought about it.”
“No, but I shouldn’t think about it,” Michael pointed out. “I should have steeled myself all my life not to think about it, and when your eldest son comes to see me, Maurice, and drinks a little too much champagne and talks as fast as his father used to talk, I shall know just exactly how to make him feel that after all he isn’t quite the silly ass he will be inclined to think himself about the middle of his third cigar.”
Michael sank farther back into the haze of his pipe and, contemplating dreamily the Mona Lisa, made up his mind that she would not become his outlook thirty years hence. Some stern old admiral with his hand on the terrestrial globe and a naval engagement in the background would better suit his mantelpiece.
“I wonder what I shall be like at fifty,” he sighed.
“It depends what you do in between nineteen and fifty,” said Avery. “You can’t possibly settle down at the Albany as soon as you leave the Varsity. You’ll have to do something.”
“What, for example?” Michael asked.
“Oh, write perhaps.”
“Write!” Michael scoffed. “Why, when I can read all these”—he pointed to his bookshelves—“and all the dozens and dozens more I intend to buy, what a fool I should be to waste my time in writing.”
“Well, I intend to write,” said Avery. “In fact, I don’t mind telling you I intend to start a paper as soon as I can.”
Michael laughed.