Peter Siner’s simple assertion to the old Captain that he was not going to marry Cissie Dildine completely allayed the old gentleman’s uneasiness.  Even the further information that Peter had had such a marriage under advisement, but had rejected it, did not put him on his guard.

From long non-intimacy with any human creature, the old legislator had forgotten that human life is one long succession of doing the things one is not going to do; he had forgotten, if he ever knew, that the human brain is primarily not a master, but a servant; its function is not to direct, but to devise schemes and apologies to gratify impulses.  It is the ways and means committee to the great legislature of the body.

For several days after his fear that Peter Siner would marry Cissie Dildine old Captain Renfrew was as felicitous as a lover newly reconciled to his mistress.  He ambled between the manor and the livery-stable with an abiding sense of well-being.  When he approached his home in the radiance of high noon and saw the roof of the old mansion lying a bluish gray in the shadows of the trees, it filled his heart with joy to feel that it was not an old and empty house that awaited his coming, but that in it worked a busy youth who would be glad to see him enter the gate.

The fear of some unattended and undignified death which had beset the old gentleman during the last eight or ten years of his life vanished under Peter’s presence.  When he thought of it at all now, he always previsioned himself being lifted in Peter’s athletic arms and laid properly on his big four-poster.

At times, when Peter sat working over the books in the library, the Captain felt a prodigious urge to lay a hand on the young man’s broad and capable shoulder.  But he never did.  Again, the old lawyer would sit for minutes at a time watching his secretary’s regular features as the brown man pursued his work with a trained intentness.  The old gentleman derived a deep pleasure from such long scrutinies.  It pleased him to imagine that, when he was young, he had possessed the same vigor, the same masculinity, the same capacity for persistent labor.  Indeed, all old gentlemen are prone to choose the most personable and virile young man they can find for themselves to have been like.

The two men had little to say to each other.  Their thoughts beat to such different tempos that any attempt at continued speech discovered unequal measures.  As a matter of fact, in all comfortable human conversation, words are used as mere buoys dropped here and there to mark well-known channels of thought and feeling.  Similarity of mental topography is necessary to mutual understanding.  Between any two generations the landscape is so changed as to be unrecognizable.  Our fathers are monarchists; our sons, bolsheviki.

Old Rose Hobbett was more of an age with the Captain, and these two talked very comfortably as the old virago came and went with food at meal-time.  For instance, the Captain always asked his servant if she had fed his cat, and old Rose invariably would sulk and poke out her lips and put off answering to the last possible moment of insolence, then would grumble out that she was jes ‘bout to feed the varmint, an’ ’t wuz funny nobody couldn’t give a hard-wuckin’ colored woman breathin’-space to turn roun’ in.