Mr. Taynton sighed, gently and not unhappily.

“Yes, yes, my dear boy, I so sympathise with you,” he said.  “Speed and violence is the proper attitude of youth, just as strength with a more measured pace is the proper gait for older folk.  And that, I fancy is just what Mrs. Assheton felt.  She would feel it to be as unnatural in you to care to drive with her in her very comfortable victoria as she would feel it to be unnatural in herself to wish to go in your lightning speed motor.  And that reminds me.  As your trustee—­”

Coffee was brought in at this moment, carried, not by one of the discreet parlour-maids, but by a young man-servant.  Mr. Taynton, with the port still by him, refused it, but looked rather curiously at the servant.  Morris however mixed himself a cup in which cream, sugar, and coffee were about equally mingled.

“A new servant of your mother’s?” he asked, when the man had left the room.

“Oh no.  It’s my man, Martin.  Awfully handy chap.  Cleans silver, boots and the motor.  Drives it, too, when I’ll let him, which isn’t very often.  Chauffeurs are such rotters, aren’t they?  Regular chauffeurs I mean.  They always make out that something is wrong with the car, just as dentists always find some hole in your teeth, if you go to them.”

Mr. Taynton did not reply to these critical generalities but went back to what he had been saying when the entry of coffee interrupted him.

“As your mother said,” he remarked, “I wanted to have a few words with you.  You are twenty-two, are you not, to-day?  Well, when I was young we considered anyone of twenty-two a boy still, but now I think young fellows grow up more quickly, and at twenty-two, you are a man nowadays, and I think it is time for you, since my trusteeship for you may end any day now, to take a rather more active interest in the state of your finances than you have hitherto done.  I want you in fact, my dear fellow, to listen to me for five minutes while I state your position to you.”

Morris indicated the port again, and Mr. Taynton refilled his glass.

“I have had twenty years of stewardship for you,” he went on, “and before my stewardship comes to an end, which it will do anyhow in three years from now, and may come to an end any day—­”

“Why, how is that?” asked Morris.

“If you marry, my dear boy.  By the terms of your father’s will, your marriage, provided it takes place with your mother’s consent, and after your twenty-second birthday, puts you in complete control and possession of your fortune.  Otherwise, as of course you know, you come of age, legally speaking, on your twenty-fifth birthday.”

Morris lit another cigarette rather impatiently.

“Yes, I knew I was a minor till I was twenty-five,” he said, “and I suppose I have known that if I married after the age of twenty-two, I became a major, or whatever you call it.  But what then?  Do let us go and play billiards, I’ll give you twenty-five in a hundred, because I’ve been playing a lot lately, and I’ll bet half a crown.”