I think that by then Pelleas and I had fairly caught the colour of Youth. For I protest that in Spring Youth is a kind of Lydian stone, and the quality of old age is proved by the colour which it can show at the stone’s touch. Though perhaps with us the gracious basanite has often exceeded its pleasant office and demonstrated us to be quite mad.
Otherwise I cannot account for the intolerance of age and the love of youth that came upon us. I was conscious of this when after breakfast one morning Pelleas and I stood at the drawing-room window watching a shower. It was an unassuming storm of little drops and infrequent gusts and looked hardly of sufficient importance to keep a baby within-doors. But we are obliged to forego our walk if so much as a sprinkling-cart passes. This is so alien to youth that it always leaves us disposed to take exception and to fail to understand and to resort to all the ill-bred devices of well-bred people who are too inventive to be openly unreasonable.
As “What a bony horse,” observed Pelleas.
“Not really bony,” I said; “its ribs do not show in the least.”
“It is bony,” reiterated Pelleas serenely. “It isn’t well fed.”
“Perhaps,” said I, “that is its type. A great many people would say that a slender woman—”
“They’re bony too,” went on Pelleas decidedly. “I never saw a slender woman who looked as if she had enough to eat.”
“Pelleas!” I cried, aghast at such apostasy; “think of the women with lovely tapering waists—”
“Bean poles,” said Pelleas.
“And sloping shoulders—”