‘I once had a wife—I once had a son. My wife died when my child was born, and my boy, at school, was carried off by typhoid.’

‘I wish I’d been there!’ said Doctor Hugh simply.

‘Well—if you’re here!’ Dencombe answered, with a smile that, in spite of dimness, showed how much he liked to be sure of his companion’s whereabouts.

‘You talk strangely of your age. You’re not old.’

‘Hypocrite—so early!’

‘I speak physiologically.’

‘That’s the way I’ve been speaking for the last five years, and it’s exactly what I’ve been saying to myself. It isn’t till we are old that we begin to tell ourselves we’re not!’

‘Yet I know I myself am young,’ Doctor Hugh declared.

‘Not so well as I!’ laughed his patient, whose visitor indeed would have established the truth in question by the honesty with which he changed the point of view, remarking that it must be one of the charms of age—at any rate in the case of high distinction—to feel that one has laboured and achieved. Doctor Hugh employed the common phrase about earning one’s rest, and it made poor Dencombe, for an instant, almost angry. He recovered himself, however, to explain, lucidly enough, that if he, ungraciously, knew nothing of such a balm, it was doubtless because he had wasted inestimable years. He had followed literature from the first, but he had taken a lifetime to get alongside of her. Only to-day, at last, had he begun to see, so that what he had hitherto done was a movement without a direction. He had ripened too late and was so clumsily constituted that he had had to teach himself by mistakes.

‘I prefer your flowers, then, to other people’s fruit, and your mistakes to other people’s successes,’ said gallant Doctor Hugh. ‘It’s for your mistakes I admire you.’

‘You’re happy—you don’t know,’ Dencombe answered.

Looking at his watch the young man had got up; he named the hour of the afternoon at which he would return. Dencombe warned him against committing himself too deeply, and expressed again all his dread of making him neglect the Countess—perhaps incur her displeasure.

‘I want to be like you—I want to learn by mistakes!’ Doctor Hugh laughed.

‘Take care you don’t make too grave a one! But do come back,’ Dencombe added, with the glimmer of a new idea.

‘You should have had more vanity!’ Doctor Hugh spoke as if he knew the exact amount required to make a man of letters normal.

‘No, no—I only should have had more time. I want another go.’

‘Another go?’

‘I want an extension.’

‘An extension?’ Again Doctor Hugh repeated Dencombe’s words, with which he seemed to have been struck.

‘Don’t you know?—I want to what they call “live”.’