A little colour came into her face. She reached a thin hand and patted him on the arm. There was not a particle of doubt as to his interest in her. She was twice his age, but their minds were contemporaries. They had met in tournament mentally and jousted for the sport of the thing; they had lent their minds out to each other and had made broad paths towards intimacy. And at the same time it was sweet flattery for her to know that this strong youth—his thirty-three years sat lightly upon him—was paying a kind of court to her intelligence. As a rule the young men had hovered about out of politeness, but were off at a nod from the daughter.
“You’re a good boy,” she said. “I shall miss you; unless——”
“I accept in advance!” he cried gaily. “You know I’m a professional guest!”
“And also some sort of a widow,” she smiled.
“Assistant widow,” he corrected; “but please don’t remind me of that. I won’t have to think of that until the November exams. begin. Let’s talk of ‘Red Jacket.’ You’re too tired to talk, so let me talk for you, tell you what you were going to say. Gracious! You don’t know what a silent crab I am usually. You have brought me out, introduced me to speech, you and Jerry.”
“What was I going to say?” she helped him, amusement in her quiet tones.
“Oh, yes,” he remembered. “You were about to invite me to ‘Red Jacket’—Jerry let the cat out of the bag—and I’m coming. We’ll have great old pow-wows, won’t we?”
She closed her eyes wearily, but the contented smile remained.
“You don’t know what a flutter you’re putting me in.” She looked at him tenderly. “Women of my age don’t often get such genuine attention from young men. It’s so rare that—well, you’ll have to be careful. Don’t give me too much of it. I’ll be getting jealous of Geraldine next; begin to fool myself into thinking I’m young again.”
“Young? Pooh!” He tossed his head. “Why all this silly eagerness to be young? Age is the thing, the goal. ‘Grow old along with me, The best is yet to be, The last of life for which the first was made.’ You remember your Ben Ezra, don’t you? Well, that’s the best of sense. Youth? It’s a time of folly and bad thinking. You don’t catch a successful business man sighing for the days when he had a tuppenny shop with more debts than customers. We don’t pine for green blueberries, do we? What’s all this march forward of growth if it doesn’t mean something mighty fine? Why, lady mine, I’m just eager to push on to forty and to fifty and to sixty—to a hundred if I could. Life’s a climax—always a climax; don’t bow for a minute to the world’s sentimental nonsense over youth.”