“It is so impossible to be young,” Claude Melville said very wearily, and with his little air of played-out indifference. He was smoking a cigarette, as always, and wore a dark red smoking-suit that, he thought, went excellently with his black eyes and swarthy complexion.
His father had been a blue-eyed Saxon giant, his mother a pretty Kentish woman, with an apple-blossom complexion and sunny hair; yet he managed to look exquisitely Turkish, and thought himself a clever boy for so doing. But then he always thought himself clever. He had cultivated this conception of himself until it had become a confirmed habit of mind. On his head was a fez with a tassel, and he was sitting upon the hearthrug with his long legs crossed meditatively. His room was dimly lit, and had an aspect of divans, Attar of roses scented the air. A fire was burning, although it was a spring evening and not cold. London roared faintly in the distance, like a lion at a far-away evening party.
“It is so impossible to be young,” Claude repeated, without emphasis. “I was middle-aged at ten. Now I am twenty-two, and have done everything I ought not to have done, I feel that life has become altogether improbable. Even if I live until I am seventy—the correct age for entering into one's dotage, I believe—I cannot expect to have a second childhood. I have never had a first.”
He sighed. It seemed so hard to be deprived of one's legal dotage.
His friend, Jimmy Haddon, looked at him and laughed. Jimmy was puffing at a pipe. His pipe was the only one Claude ever allowed to be smoked among his divans and his roses.
After thoroughly completing his laugh, Jimmy remarked:—
“Would you like to take a lesson in the art of being young?”
“Immensely.”
“I know somebody who could give you one.”
“Really, Jimmy! What strange people you always know; curates, and women who have never written improper novels, and all sorts of beings who seem merely mythical to the rest of us!”