I eyed him sourly, as he droned on about 'reactionable endowment',
'surrender-value', and 'interest accumulating on the tontine
policy', and tried, as I did so, to analyse the loathing I felt
for him. I came to the conclusion that it was partly due to his
pose of doing the whole thing from purely altruistic motives,
entirely for my good, and partly because he forced me to face the
fact that I was not always going to be young. In an abstract
fashion I had already realized that I should in time cease to be
thirty, but the way in which Glossop spoke of my sixty-fifth
birthday made me feel as if it was due tomorrow. He was a man with
a manner suggestive of a funeral mute suffering from suppressed
jaundice, and I had never before been so weighed down with a sense
of the inevitability of decay and the remorseless passage of time.
I could feel my hair whitening.

A need for solitude became imperative; and, murmuring something
about thinking it over, I escaped from the room.

Except for my bedroom, whither he was quite capable of following
me, I had no refuge but the grounds. I unbolted the front door and
went out.

It was still freezing, and, though the stars shone, the trees grew
so closely about the house that it was too dark for me to see more
than a few feet in front of me.

I began to stroll up and down. The night was wonderfully still. I
could hear somebody walking up the drive--one of the maids, I
supposed, returning from her evening out. I could even hear a bird