"Take perhaps the only thing really worth doing in life," and Gerard perceptibly saddened. "That is, marrying a woman you love, or I should say the woman, for you only really love one woman--I'm old-fashioned enough to think that,--well, I say, marrying the woman you love, and bringing into the world that miracle of miracles,--a child that shall be something of you and all her: that certainly is something to have done before thirty, and not to be repeated, perhaps, more than once before or after. She will want a boy like you, and you will have a girl like her. That you may easily accomplish before thirty. Afterwards, however, if you go on repeating each other, what do you do but blur the individuality of the original masterpieces--though," pursued Gerard, laughing, always ready to forget his original argument in the seductiveness of an unexpected development of it, "though, after all, I admit, there might be a temptation sometimes to improve upon the originals. 'Agnes, my dear,' we might say, 'I'm not quite satisfied yet with the shade of Eva's hair. It's nearly yours, but not quite. It's an improvement on Anna's, whose eyes now are exactly yours. Eva's, unfortunately, are not so faithful. I'm afraid we'll have to try again.'
"No, but seriously," he once more began, "for a really vital and successful life there is no adequate employment of the faculties after thirty, except, of course, in the repetition of former successes. No; I even withdraw that,--not the repetition, only the conservation, the feeding, of former successes. The success is in the creation. When a world is once created, any fool can keep it spinning.
"Man's life is at least thirty years too long. Two score years is more than enough for us to say what we were sent here to say; and if you'll consider those biographies in which you are most interested, the biographies of great writers, you cannot but bear me out. What, for instance, did Keats and Shelley and Burns and Byron lose by dying, all of them long before they were forty,--Keats even long before he was thirty; and what did Wordsworth and Coleridge gain by living so long after? Wordsworth and Coleridge didn't even live to repeat themselves, else, of course, one would have begged them to go on living for ever; for some repetitions, it is admitted, are welcome,--for instance, won't you have a little more whisky?"
Henry always agreed so completely with Gerard's talk, or at least so delighted in it, that he had little scope of opportunity to say much himself; and Gerard was too keen a talker to complain of a rapt young listener.
"How old are you?" he said, presently.
"Twenty-two next month."
"Twenty-two! How wonderful to be twenty-two! Yet I don't suppose you've realised it in the least. In your own view, you're an aged philosopher, white with a past, and bowed down with the cares of a future. Just you stay in bed all day to-morrow, and ponder on the wonderfulness of being twenty-two!
"I'm forty-two. You're beginning--I'm done with. And yet, in some ways, I believe I'm younger than you--though, perhaps, alas! what I consider the youth in me is only the wish to be young again, the will to do and enjoy, without the force and the appetite. But, by the way, when I say I'm forty-two, I mean that I'm forty-two in the course of next week, next Thursday, in fact, and if you'll do me that kindness, I should be grateful if you would join me that evening in celebrating the melancholy occasion. I've got a great mind to enlist your sympathy in a little ancient history, if it won't be too great a tax upon your goodness; but I'll think it over between now and then."
Gerard's birthday had come; and the ancient history he had spoken of had proved to be a chapter of his own history, the beauty and sadness of which had made an impression upon Henry, to be rendered ineffaceable a very few days after in a sudden and terrible manner.
One early morning about four, just as it was growing light, he had suddenly awakened with a strong feeling that some one was bending over him. He opened his eyes, to see, as he thought, Gerard hastily leaving his bedside.