“I’m not so old,” he rejoined, sluggishly—“only thirty-four.”
She could not suppress her astonishment. She looked at the hair already gray, the hard, pinched face, the lustreless eyes.
“Yet it must seem long to you,” she said, with meaning.
Now he laughed—a laugh sodden and mirthless. He was thinking of his boyhood. Everything, save one or two spots all fire or all darkness, was dim in his debilitated mind.
“Too far to go back,” he said, with a gleam of the intelligence which had been strong in him once.
She caught the gleam. She had wisdom beyond her years. It was the greater because her mother was dead, and she had had so much wealth to dispense, for her father was rich beyond counting, and she controlled his household and helped to regulate his charities. She saw that he was not of the laboring classes, that he had known better days; his speech, if abrupt and cheerless, was grammatical.
“If you cannot go back, you can go forward,” she said, firmly. “Why should you be the only man in this beautiful land who lives like this, who is idle when there is so much to do, who sleeps in the daytime when there is so much time to sleep at night?”
A faint flush came on the grayish, colorless face. “I don’t sleep at night,” he returned, moodily.
“Why don’t you sleep?” she asked.
He did not answer, but stirred the body of the snake with his foot. The tail moved; he stamped upon the head with almost frenzied violence, out of keeping with his sluggishness.