“He’s very young in his thoughts,” said Kendricks; “and that’s much more to the purpose for a magazine editor. There are very few men of his age who keep in touch with the times as he does.”
“Still, Mrs. March seems a good deal younger, don’t you think? I wonder how soon they begin to feel old?”
“Oh, not till along in the forties, I should say. It’s a good deal in temperament. I don’t suppose that either of them realises yet that they’re old, and they must be nearly fifty.”
“How strange it must be,” said the girl, “fifty years old! Twenty seems old enough, goodness knows.”
“How should you like to be a dotard of twenty-seven?” Kendricks asked, and she laughed at his joke.
“I don’t suppose I should mind it so much if I were a man.”
I had promised myself that if the talk became at all confidential I would drop behind out of earshot; but though it was curiously intimate for me to be put apart in the minds of these young people on account of my years as not of the same race or fate as themselves, there was nothing in what they said that I might not innocently overhear, as far as they were concerned, and I listened on.
But they had apparently given me quite enough attention. After some mutual laughter at what she said last, they were silent a moment, and then he said soberly, “There’s something fine in this isolation the dark gives you, isn’t there? You’re as remote in it from our own time and place as if you were wandering in interplanetary space.”
“I suppose we are doing that all the time—on the earth,” she suggested.
“Yes; but how hard it is to realise that we are on the earth now. Sometimes I have a sense of it, though, when the moon breaks from one flying cloud to another. Then it seems as if I were a passenger on some vast, shapeless ship sailing through the air. What,” he asked, with no relevancy that I could perceive, “was the strangest feeling you ever had?” I remembered asking girls such questions when I was young, and their not apparently thinking it at all odd.