‘That you’re old?’
‘Hang it, Roger, not so bad as that—elderly. This will stagger you; but I assure you that until the other day I jogged along thinking of myself as on the whole still one of the juveniles.’ He makes a wry face. ‘I crossed the bridge, Roger, without knowing it.’
‘What made you know?’
‘What makes us know all the new things, Roger?—the war. I’ll tell you a secret. When we realised in August of 1914 that myriads of us were to be needed, my first thought wasn’t that I had a son, but that I must get fit myself.’
‘You!’
‘Funny, isn’t it?’ says Mr. Torrance quite nastily. ‘But, as I tell you, I didn’t know I had ceased to be young. I went into Regent’s Park and tried to run a mile.’
‘Lummy, you might have killed yourself.’
‘I nearly did—especially as I had put a weight on my shoulders to represent my kit. I kept at it for a week, but I knew the game was up. The discovery was pretty grim, Roger.’
‘Don’t you bother about that part of it. You are doing your share, taking care of mother and Emma.’
Mr. Torrance emits a laugh of self-contempt. ‘I am not taking care of them. It is you who are taking care of them. My friend, you are the head of the house now.’