“Why be personal?” the doctor inquired crisply.
“Why not?”
“I’m sure Cecil doesn’t mind,” said Diana. Her little laugh struck the doctor as singularly inane.
“Cecil will have learnt to stand a little friendly teasing by now, no doubt,” Ford observed.
The doctor did not fail to perceive the implication, and he saw that Rose also had not missed it. Cecil remained listless and indifferent.
“Cecil has his life before him, we will hope, in which to learn more interesting things than elementary accomplishments, which, so far as I am aware, he acquired in the nursery. Now you and I,” the doctor addressed himself very directly to Ford Aviolet, “you and I, my dear fellow, have left our adventurous days behind us. Achievement, romance, success—it’s all behind us, not ahead of us. The future doesn’t belong to us at all. We shall only have the privilege of watching the present generation, to which you so casually alluded just now. Our mark, if it was ever made at all, was made in the past.”
The doctor’s gaze travelled cheerfully and deliberately round the safe, solid interior that had constituted Ford’s environment for so many years, and came to rest, still cheerful, still deliberate, and wholly implacable, on Ford’s face.
“They say that history always repeats itself,” said Lady Aviolet, boredom in her voice.
Ford, returning the doctor’s look, ignored his mother’s irrelevance. “Very interesting, although I fancy you and I are not exactly contemporaries to a day, doctor. But the point? May I confess that I don’t quite understand——?”
“Oh, I think you do. I fancy you and I understand one another in all essentials.” The significance in Dr. Lucian’s tone was entirely undisguised.