“Thank you. You know I love it. Especially Pip.”
He considered.
“There was a word one of my young men used the other day about Dickens. Gusto, I think—yes, that was it. Well, I find that, as I grow older, that seems to be the thing I value rather more than most men of my age. Gusto.” He smiled “Though I take it more quietly, perhaps,—than I did when I was young,” he added.
“You are young” said Mrs. Severance carefully.
“Not really, dear. I can give half-a-dozen youngsters I know four strokes in nine holes and beat them. I can handle the bank in half the time and with half the worry that some of my people take to one department. And for a little while more, Rose, I may be able to satisfy you. But” and he passed a hand lightly over his hair. “It's grey, you know,” he ended.
“As if it mattered,” said Mrs. Severance, a little pettishly.
“It does matter, Rose.” His eyes darkened with memory—with the sort of memory that hurts more to forget than even to remember. “Do you realize that I am sixteen years older than you are?” he said a little hurriedly as if he were trying to scribble the memory over with any kind of words.
“But my dear” and she smiled, “you were sixteen years older six years ago—remember? There's less real difference between us now than there was then.”
“Yes, I certainly wasn't as young in some ways—six years ago.” He seemed to speak almost as if unconsciously, almost as if the words were being squeezed out of him in sleep by a thing that had pressed for a long time with a steady weight on his mind till the mind must release itself or be broken. “But then nobody could be with you, for a month even, and not feel himself turn younger whether he wanted to or not.” “So that's settled.” She was trying to carry it lightly, to take the darkness out of his eyes. “And once you've bought our steamer tickets we can leave it all behind at the wharf and by the time we land we'll be so disgracefully young that no one will recognize us—just think—we can keep going back and back till I'm putting my hair up for the first time and you're in little short trousers—and then babies, I suppose and the other side of getting born—” but her voice, for once, turned ineffectually against his centeredness of gaze, that seemed now as if it had turned back on itself for a struggling moment and regarded neither what was nor what might be, but only what was past.
“Six years ago” he said with the same drowsy thoughtfulness. “Well, Rose, I shall always be—most grateful—for those six years.”