Part 40 (2/2)
”I have never been young,” he answered, eating his devilled kidney with a silent pathos of perseverance--”never.”
”And I shall never be old, or, at any rate, feel old. It can't be done.
I'm sixty-four, and look it, but I can't cease to revel in details, take an interest in people, and regard life as my half-opened oyster. It is a pity one can't go on living till one is two or three hundred or so.
There is so much to see and know. Our existence in the world is like a day at the Stores. We have to go away before we have been into a quarter of the different departments.”
”I don't find life at all like that. I have seen all the departments till I am sick of them. But perhaps you never come to London?”
”Every year for three months to see my friends. I stay at an hotel. It is a most delightful time.”
Her tone was warm with pleasant memories. Claude felt himself more and more surprised.
”You enjoy the country, and London?” he said.
”I enjoy everything,” said Miss Haddon. ”And surely most people do.”
”None of the people I know seem to enjoy anything very much. They try everything, of course. That is one's duty.”
”Then the latest literature really reflects life, I imagine,” Miss Haddon said. ”If what you say is true, everything includes the sins as well as the virtues. I have often wondered whether the books that I have thought utterly and absurdly false could possibly be the outcome of facts.”
”Such as what books?”
”Oh, I'll name no names. The authors may be your personal friends. But it is so then? In their search after happiness the people of to-day, the moderns, give the warm shoulder to vice as well as to virtue?”
”They ignore nothing.”
”Not even duty?”
”Our duty is to ourselves, and can never be ignored.”
Miss Haddon tapped a boiled egg very sharply on its head with a spoon.
She wondered if the action were a performance of duty to herself or to the egg.
”That, I understand,” she remarked briskly, ”is the doctrine of what is called in London the young decadent; and in the country--forgive me--sometimes the young devil of the day.”
”I am decadent, Miss Haddon,” Claude said with a gentle pride that was not wholly ungraceful.
The elderly lady swept him with a bright look of fresh and healthy interest.
”How exciting,” she exclaimed, after a moment's decisive pause, but with a completely natural air. ”You are the first I have seen. For Jimmy isn't one, is he?”
”Jimmy! No. He plays football, and eats cold roast beef and cheese for lunch.”
”Do tell me--how does one do it?”
She seemed intensely interested, and was merrily munching an apple grown in one of her own orchards.
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