Ishmael laughed, but felt rather annoyed all the same.

“What is one to do?  I am growing old.”

“Nonsense!  Have the decency to remember that compared with me you are a young man.  Wait till you are close on eighty and then see how you feel about it.”

Ishmael had a quick feeling that after all he was young compared with this frail, burning whiteness, yet it seemed to him that he could never be as old as that, that then indeed life could not be worth living.  Aloud he said mechanically: 

“You?  You are always young.”

“Age does not matter when you are really old; it is only the getting old that matters,” said Boase; “it is like death.  No one minds being dead; it’s the dying that appals.  But seriously, my dear boy, what really matters is to have the quality of youth.  Don’t lose that.”

“I’m not sure I ever had it,” said Ishmael slowly, sitting down by the long chair.

“Perhaps not.  You were acutely young, which is not quite the same thing.  Our friend Killigrew had the quality of youth.  One can say of him that he died young.  I think your Nicky has that quality too.  That’s why he’ll be so good for you.”

“What about the girls?  Aren’t they enough to save my soul alive?”

“Oh, well, girls are never quite the same thing.  A father loves his daughters if anything more than his sons, but it’s as a father and not as a fellow human.  You know, I’ve seen a good deal of Judith this summer; she’s always good at coming and talking to an old man, and what interests me about her is that she keeps so fluid.  I mean that she never sticks where she was.  I don’t want you to either.  You came in the days of Ruskin and Pater and of great men politically, but I don’t want you to stick there.  There’s no merit in being right at one time in one’s life if one sticks to that rightness after it has lost its significance.  You know, a stopped clock is right twice every twenty-four hours, but it’s a rightness without value.  Keep fluid, Ishmael.  It is the only youth.”

“Is that why you’re reading ’Robert Elsmere’?” asked Ishmael, with a smile.

“Exactly.  I’m not going to change what feeds my soul daily for what is offered me between these covers, but that’s not the point.  One can always discriminate, but one should always give oneself things to discriminate between.”

There was a short silence, which the Parson broke.  “I too have had a letter,” he said, and there was something in his voice which made Ishmael aware of a portent beyond the ordinary.  “From Archelaus ...” added Boase.

“From Archelaus?” echoed Ishmael.  The name came upon him like the name of one dead, it seemed to him that when they spoke of Killigrew they touched more upon the living than when they mentioned Archelaus.  “Why does he write?” he added; and his voice sounded harsh and dry even to his own ears, so that he felt a little shame at himself.