Adrian pushed back his chair.  “Let me—!” he began, but his uncle waved a deprecating hand.  “Sit down!” he managed to say.  “Please!” Adrian sank back again.  The colour returned to his uncle’s cheeks and the staring question left his eyes.  He took a sip of wine.

“I cannot tell you,” he observed with elaborate indifference, “how humiliating this thing is becoming to me.  I have always had a theory that invalids and people when they begin to get old and infirm, should be put away some place where they can undergo the unpleasant struggle alone.  It’s purely selfish—­there’s something about the sanctity of the individual.  Dogs have it right—­you know the way they creep off?  But I suppose I won’t.  Pride fails when the body weakens, doesn’t it, no matter what the will may be?” He lifted his wine-glass.  “I am afraid I am giving you a very dull evening, my dear fellow,” he apologized.  “Forgive me!  We will talk of more pleasant things.  I drink wine with you!  How is Cecil?  Doing well with her painting?”

Adrian attempted to relax his own inner grimness.  He responded to his uncle’s toast.  But he wished this old man, so very near the mysterious crisis of his affairs, would begin to forego to some extent the habit of a lifetime, become a little more human.  This ridiculous “facade”!  The dinner progressed.

Through an open window the night, full of soft, distant sound, made itself felt once more.  The candles, under their red shades, flickered at intervals.  The noiseless butler came and went.  How old his uncle was getting to look, Adrian reflected.  There was a grayness about his cheeks; fine, wire-like lines about his mouth.  And he was falling into that sure sign of age, a vacant absent-mindedness.  Half the time he was not listening to what he, Adrian, was saying; instead, his eyes sought constantly the shadows over the carved sideboard across the table from him.  What did he see there?  What question was he asking?  Adrian wondered.  Only once was his uncle very much interested, and that was when Adrian had spoken of the war and the psychology left in its train.  Adrian himself had not long before been released from a weary round of training-camps, where, in Texas dust, or the unpleasant resinous summer of the South, he had gone through a repetition that in the end had threatened to render him an imbecile.  He was not illusioned.  As separate personalities, men had lost much of their glamour for him; there had been too much sweat, too much crowding, too much invasion of dignity, of everything for which the world claimed it had been struggling and praying.  But alongside of this revolt on his part had grown up an immense pity and belief in humanity as a mass—­struggling, worm-like, aspiring, idiotic, heroic.  The thought of it made him uncomfortable and at the same time elate.