Vicary had just given, in his driest manner, a description of his recent visit to receive the accolade from the Queen.  It was replete with the usual quaint Vicary details—­such as the solemn warning whisper of an equerry in Vicary’s ear as he walked backwards, ’Mind the edge of the carpet’; and we all laughed, I absently, and yet a little hysterically—­all save Vicary, whose foible was never to laugh.  But immediately afterwards there was a pause, one of those disconcerting, involuntary pauses which at a social gathering are like a chill hint of autumn in late summer, and which accuse the hostess.  It was over in an instant; the broken current was resumed; everybody pretended that everything was as usual at my receptions.  But that pause was the beginning of the downfall.

With a fierce effort I tried to escape from my entrancement, to be interested in these unreal shadows whose voices seemed to come to me from a distance, and to make my glance forget the door, where the one reality in the world for me, my unspoken lover, should have appeared long since.  I joined unskilfully in a conversation which Vicary and Mrs. Sardis and her daughter Jocelyn were conducting quite well without my assistance.  The rest were chattering now, in one or two groups, except Lord Francis Alcar, who, I suddenly noticed, sat alone on a settee behind the piano.  Here was another unfortunate result of my preoccupation.  By what negligence had I allowed him to be thus forsaken?  I rose and went across to him, penitent, and glad to leave the others.

There are only two fundamental differences in the world—­the difference between sex and sex, and the difference between youth and age.  Lord Francis Alcar was sixty years older than me.  His life was over before mine had commenced.  It seemed incredible; but I had acquired the whole of my mundane experience, while he was merely waiting for death.  At seventy, men begin to be separated from their fellow-creatures.  At eighty, they are like islets sticking out of a sea.  At eighty-five, with their trembling and deliberate speech, they are the abstract voice of human wisdom.  They gather wisdom with amazing rapidity in the latter years, and even their folly is wise then.  Lord Francis was eighty-six; his faculties enfeebled but intact after a career devoted to the three most costly of all luxuries—­pretty women, fine pictures, and rare books; a tall, spare man, quietly proud of his age, his ability to go out in the evening unattended, his amorous past, and his contributions to the history of English printing.

As I approached him, he leaned forward into his favourite attitude, elbows on knees and fingertips lightly touching, and he looked up at me.  And his eyes, sunken and fatigued and yet audacious, seemed to flash out.  He opened his thin lips to speak.  When old men speak, they have the air of rousing themselves from an eternal contemplation in order to do so, and what they say becomes accordingly oracular.