I
"It is so impossible to be young," Claude Melville said very wearily,
and with his little air of played-out indifference. He was smoking a
cigarette, as always, and wore a dark red smoking-suit that, he thought,
went excellently with his black eyes and swarthy complexion.
His father had been a blue-eyed Saxon giant, his mother a pretty Kentish
woman, with an apple-blossom complexion and sunny hair; yet he managed
to look exquisitely Turkish, and thought himself a clever boy for so
doing. But then he always thought himself clever. He had cultivated this
conception of himself until it had become a confirmed habit of mind. On
his head was a fez with a tassel, and he was sitting upon the hearthrug
with his long legs crossed meditatively. His room was dimly lit, and had
an aspect of divans, Attar of roses scented the air. A fire was burning,
although it was a spring evening and not cold. London roared faintly in
the distance, like a lion at a far-away evening party.
"It is so impossible to be young," Claude repeated, without emphasis. "I
was middle-aged at ten. Now I am twenty-two, and have done everything I
ought not to have done, I feel that life has become altogether
improbable. Even if I live until I am seventy--the correct age for
entering into one's dotage, I believe--I cannot expect to have a second
childhood. I have never had a first."
He sighed. It seemed so hard to be deprived of one's legal dotage.
His friend, Jimmy Haddon, looked at him and laughed. Jimmy was puffing
at a pipe. His pipe was the only one Claude ever allowed to be smoked
among his divans and his roses.