w
many medals of distinction, could fail at anything, was a new thought,
bewildering and bitter. This time he escaped from the table and flung
up a window. Whitaker, he grumbled, never toasted crackers without
burning them. Whitaker brought him back with a look.

"Sit down," he said again. "I don't propose to talk while you roam
around the studio and kick things."

Kenny obeyed. He looked a little white.

"I've tried to think this thing out fairly," said Whitaker. "Why as a
parent for Brian you're a failure--"

"Well?"

"And the first and fundamental cause of your failure is, I think, your
hairbrained, unquenchable youth."

Kenny stared at him in astounded silence.

"I remember once around the fire here you told a Celtic tale of some
golden islands--Tirnanoge, wasn't it?--the Land of the Young--"

Might have been, Kenny said perversely. He didn't remember.

"Ossian lived there with the daughter of the King of Youth for three
hundred years that seemed but three," reminded Whitaker. "Well, no
matter. The point is this: The Land of the Young and the King of Youth
always make me think of you."

"It is true," said Kenny with biting sarcasm, "that I still have hair
and teeth. It is also true that I am the respectable if unsuccessful
parent of a son twenty-three years old and I myself am forty-four."

"Forty-four years young," admitted Whitaker. "And Brian on the other
hand is twenty-three years old. There you have it. You know precisely
what I mean, Kenny. Youth isn't always a matter of years. It's a
state of being. Sometimes it's an affliction and sometimes a gift.
Sometimes it's chronic and sometimes it's contagious enough to start an
epidemic. You're as young and irresponsible as the wind. You've never
grown up. God knows whether or not you ever will. But Brian has.
There's the clash."

"Go on," said Kenny with a dangerous flash of interest in his eyes.
"You've an undeniable facility, John, with what you call the truth."

"It's an unfortunate characteristic of highly temperamentalized
individuals--"

"Painters, Irishmen and O'Neills," put in Kenny with sulky impudence.

"That they frequently skirt the rocks for themselves with amazing
skill. I mean just this: They don't always shipwreck their own lives."

Was that, Kenny would like to know, an essential of successful
parenthood?

"I mean," he paraphrased dryly, "must you wreck your own life, John, to
parent somebody else with skil