The remark appeared to me slightly inconsequent, but Tommy laughed and drew back under the shade of the tree. Then came a rush of white limbs, and he was bobbing up again in the middle of the sunny pool.
"Well dived," I cried, encouragingly, but he looked a little contemptuous.
"It was a jolly bad one," he said, "a beastly...." Delicacy forbids me to record the exact word he used, but it ended with "flopper."
He crawled out again, and shook the water from his eyes.
"I say, won't you come in?" he cried eagerly. "It's simply grand in there, and a gravel bottom."
But I am a man of careful habits, and sober ways, with a reputation for some stateliness both of behaviour and bearing, and I shook my head.
Tommy urged again.
"It's not as if you were an old man," he cried.
The thought had not occurred to me. Age, in our little fraternity had been a matter of but small interest. We had pursued the same routine of gentle exercise, and dignified diversion, quiet jest and cultured occupation, for so many years now, that we had seemed to be alike removed from youth and age, in a quiet, unalterable, back-water of life, quite apart from the hurrying stream of contemporary event.