"I have given up poetry," said I, "and you cannot scan that communication in your hand."
"But it is something worse than poetry! It is prose inflated and puffed and bubbled. You are falling into your old moony ways again, and sonneteering in plain English. Are you not ashamed, at your age?"
"What age do you mean? I feel no infirmities of age. If my hair is gray, 'tis not with years, as By—"
"If your hair is gray, it is because you are forty-eight, my old beauty."
"Forty-five!" I said, with some little natural heat.
"Forty-five let it be, though you have said so these three years. And what age is that to go running after the foot of the rainbow? Here you are, my dear Flemming, breathing forth hymns to Spring, and inviting your friends to picnics! Don't you know that April is the traitor among the twelve months of the year? You are ready to strike for Marly in a linen coat and slippers! Have you forgotten, my poor fellow, that Marly is windy and raw, and that Louis XIV. caught that chill at Marly of which he died? Ah, Paul, you are right enough. You are young, still young. You are not forty-eight: you are sixteen—sixteen for the third time."
Hohenfels, whose once fine temper is going a little, stirred the fire and suddenly rose.
"Lend me an umbrella!" he repeated imperatively.
"Are you in such a hurry to go? That is not very complimentary to me," I observed. "Have you done scolding me?"