dissolute and wabbly senescence--you have spent the afternoon talking
about tan and a lady's legs."

Maury pulled down the shade with a sudden harsh snap.

"Idiot!" he cried, "that from you! Here I sit, young Anthony, as I'll
sit for a generation or more and watch such gay souls as you and Dick
and Gloria Gilbert go past me, dancing and singing and loving and hating
one another and being moved, being eternally moved. And I am moved only
by my lack of emotion. I shall sit and the snow will come--oh, for a
Caramel to take notes--and another winter and I shall be thirty and you
and Dick and Gloria will go on being eternally moved and dancing by me
and singing. But after you've all gone I'll be saying things for new
Dicks to write down, and listening to the disillusions and cynicisms and
emotions of new Anthonys--yes, and talking to new Glorias about the tans
of summers yet to come."

The firelight flurried up on the hearth. Maury left the window, stirred
the blaze with a poker, and dropped a log upon the andirons. Then he sat
back in his chair and the remnants of his voice faded in the new fire
that spit red and yellow along the bark.

"After all, Anthony, it's you who are very romantic and young. It's you
who are infinitely more susceptible and afraid of your calm being
broken. It's me who tries again and again to be moved--let myself go a
thousand times and I'm always me. Nothing--quite--stirs me.

"Yet," he murmured after another long pause, "there was something about
that little girl with her absurd tan that was eternally old--like me."