"How old are you?" he said, presently.
"Twenty-two next month."
"Twenty-two! How wonderful to be twenty-two! Yet I don't suppose you've
realised it in the least. In your own view, you're an aged philosopher,
white with a past, and bowed down with the cares of a future. Just you
stay in bed all day to-morrow, and ponder on the wonderfulness of being
twenty-two!
"I'm forty-two. You're beginning--I'm done with. And yet, in some ways,
I believe I'm younger than you--though, perhaps, alas! what I consider
the youth in me is only the wish to be young again, the will to do and
enjoy, without the force and the appetite. But, by the way, when I say
I'm forty-two, I mean that I'm forty-two in the course of next week,
next Thursday, in fact, and if you'll do me that kindness, I should be
grateful if you would join me that evening in celebrating the melancholy
occasion. I've got a great mind to enlist your sympathy in a little
ancient history, if it won't be too great a tax upon your goodness; but
I'll think it over between now and then."
Gerard's birthday had come; and the ancient history he had spoken of
had proved to be a chapter of his own history, the beauty and sadness of
which had made an impression upon Henry, to be rendered ineffaceable a
very few days after in a sudden and terrible manner.
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