light hair of the kind that
never turns gray: he is still slender, but much bent. He went over to
the fireplace and crouched before the coals that were flickering there
still. Then he said, with that gentle, half-laughing voice, "Take
care, Paul, old boy! Children who show sense too early never grow,
they say: by parity of argument, men who are poetical too late in life
never get their senses."

"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.

[Illustration]

"Are you in such a hurry to go? That is not very complimentary to me,"
I observed. "Have you done scolding me?"

What is called by some my growing worldliness teaches me to value
dryness in an old friend as I value dryness in a fine, cobwebbed,
crusty wine. It is from the merest Sybaritism that I surround myself
with comrades who, like Hohenfels, can fit their knobs into my
pattern, and receive my knobs in their own vacancy. My hint brought
him over at once into the leathern chair opposite the one I occupy.

"Paul, Paul," he said, "I only criticise you for your good. What have
you done with your three adolescences? You are getting stout, yet you
still write poetically. You have some wit, imagination, learning and
ap