He got to his feet with a vigorous precision of movement which the other
admired. "Well, he's grown to be considerable of a man," he thought to
himself. "A pity his father couldn't have lived to see it, all that
aliveness that had bothered them so much, down at last where he's got
his grip on it. And enough of it, plenty of it, oceans of it, left so
that he is still about forty times more alive than anybody else." He
looked tolerantly with his tired elderly amusement at the other,
stepping about, surveying the room and every object in it.
The younger brought himself up short in front of a framed photograph.
"Why, here's a château-fort I don't know!" he said with an abrupt
accent. He added, with some vehemence, "I never even heard of it, I'm
sure. And it's authentic, evidently."
The older man sat perfectly still. He did not know what a shatto four
was, nor had he the slightest desire to ask and bring the information
down on him, given as the other would give it, pressingly, vividly, so
that you had to listen whether you wanted to or not. Heaven knew he did
not want to know about whatever it was, this time. Not about that, nor
anything else. He only wanted to rest and have a little life before it
was too late. It was already too late for any but the quietest sort. But
that was no matter. He wouldn't have liked the other kind very well
probably. He certainly had detested the sort of "life" he'd experienced
in business. The quietest sort was what he had always wanted and never
got. And now it really seemed as though he was going to have it. For all
his fatigued pose in the old arm-chair, his heart beat faster at the
idea. He hadn't got used to being free yet. He'd heard people say that
when you were first married it was like that, you couldn't realize it.
He'd heard one of the men at the office say that for a long time, every
time he heard his bride's skirts rustle, he had to turn his head to make
sure she was really there. Well, he would like now to get up and look
out of that window and see if his garden was really there. His garden!
He thought with a secret feeling, half pity and half shame, of those
yellowed old seed catalogues which had come, varnished and brilliant and
new, year after year, so long ago, which he'd looked at so hard and so
long, in the evenings, and put away to get yellow and sallow like his
face . . . and his hopes. It must be almost time to "make garden," he
thought. He had heard them saying at the store that the sap was
beginning to run in the maple-trees. He would have just time to get
himself settled in his house . . . he felt an absurd young flush come up
under his grizzled beard at this phrase . . . "his house," his own house,
with bookshelves, and a garden. How he loved it all already! He sat very
still, feeling those savagely lopped-off tendrils put out their curling
fingers once more, this time unafraid. He sat there in the comfortable
old arm-chair at rest as never before. He thought, "This is the way I'm
going to feel right along, every day, all the time," and closed his
eyes.