"I haven't seen him for twenty years," Arthur said. "He's getting on for ninety, isn't he?"
"Ninety-one last October, sir," the chauffeur told him, "and he'd make a good seventy in a manner of speaking. A bit absent-minded sometimes, he don't always hear you when you speak to him; but no doubt that's because he's thinking o' something else. He's not what you call deaf, not in the least."
"Good Lord. Wonderful!" Arthur commented. His mind was engaged in framing a tentative essay on the causes of disability in old age, more particularly with reference to arterio-sclerosis, but he reserved that as being a shade too technical. "Though there's no real reason, you know," he said, "why we shouldn't live to be a hundred or even a hundred and twenty. There's a fellow in Asia Minor who is supposed to be a hundred and fifty."
"I suppose not, sir," the chauffeur replied without enthusiasm, and added, apparently as an afterthought, "You're a doctor, I was told, sir."
Arthur nodded. "I haven't come down here professionally, though," he said.
"No, sir; I shouldn't say as Mr Kenyon had much faith in doctors...." The chauffeur's sentence tailed off on a high note, with an effect of there being more to come; also he reduced the pace of the car as if he had something of importance to add before they reached the house.
"I've wondered sometimes, sir," he continued, after a short pause, "whether he oughtn't to—to take advice, as they say. Them fits of absent-mindedness I was telling you about, for instance, come on very queer sometimes. It's like as if he was sound asleep with his eyes wide open. Scared me once or twice he has. I thought perhaps being a doctor you might be able to say if it was anything serious. Of course, being ninety-one...."
Arthur would have liked to give a ready diagnosis of this abnormal condition, but his expertise was not equal to the task, and he fell back on the usual defence of his profession.
"Couldn't possibly say without examining him," he said. "It might be due to one of several conditions."