“I know, but give me a moment. Do you care about the future much, by the way? I don’t. Give me the immediate present. To think much about the future is a sign of age. No one begins to care about the future until he is too old to have any. Besides, it implies that the present has ceased to be absorbing.”
Martin pondered this.
“Oh, no; I don’t think that is so at all.”
Stella laughed.
“You never, by any chance, agree with a word I say,” she remarked.
“Well, you haven’t agreed with me since August,” he said. “I made a note of it. But that is why we have no stupid pauses. All conversation runs dry in two minutes if one agrees with the other person. But what you say about age really isn’t so. Look at Karl Rusoff or Lady Sunningdale. They both live intensely in the present.”
“Ah, you are shallow,” she said. “Years have got nothing whatever to do with age. That is the most superficial view. People of ninety die young, people of twenty die of senile decay.”
Martin stretched his trouser over his crossed knee.
“I am a hundred and eleven,” he said, “and whiles—don’t you hate the Scotch—and whiles I am about twelve in an Eton collar.”
“Yes, loathe them, laddie. Hoots! That is what is so maddening about you. Half the time I think I am talking to my great-uncle, and the rest of it to my little nephew up from the country.”