construction. He still feels quite fit; but on the way home he mutters to himself with a playful grimness: "A-ha! Baldness, Blindness, and Toothlessness are scouting out a position before the main army of Death." Then he notices with a realizing eye how tall his sons are growing, and how independent, and how—well, he would call it saucy, if they were not so tall. He has to contradict them firmly because—well, they have no business at their age to know so much more about the point than their father. But he fails to feel impressive in the assertion of his authority, for even when they seem to assent, he has a subtle uneasy sense that they are merely humoring him, with an indulgent filial smile in their sleeves. Presently he overhears one of them referring to him as The Old Man.
"The Old Man! Good Heavens!" he exclaims, "How old am I? Forty?—Forty is nothing, nowadays. President Eliot went bicycling before breakfast, at seventy-five. Lounsbury played the New England tennis champion at seventy-five. At eighty-five or ninety Uncle Joe Cannon and Chauncey Depew had just got started. At forty, a man is a mere fledgling." So he soothes and flatters himself. But, in this season of disillusion, another fact gradually establishes itself in his awakened consciousness—a fact full of pathos and mystery: he discovers that the unchallengeably young people really prefer their own society to his, while he himself prefers their society to that of the men of forty. There is nothing like that to plunge a sword
