I looked out at the window:  it was snowing.

The moment seemed inopportune for the delivery of my epistle:  I endeavored to conceal it—­without hypocrisy and by a natural movement—­under the usual pile of manuscript on my table devoted to Progressive Geography.  But the baron had spied his name on the address:  “How is that?  You were writing to me?  There, I will spare you the trouble of posting.”

He read my sentences, turning at the end of each period to look out at the snow, which was heavily settling in large damp flakes.  He said nothing at first about the discrepancy, but only looked forth alternately with his reading, which was pointed enough.  I said long ago that the beauty of Hohenfels’ character, like that of the precious opal, was owing to a defect in his organization.  The baron retains his girlish expression, his blue eye, and his light hair of the kind that never turns gray:  he is still slender, but much bent.  He went over to the fireplace and crouched before the coals that were flickering there still.  Then he said, with that gentle, half-laughing voice, “Take care, Paul, old boy!  Children who show sense too early never grow, they say:  by parity of argument, men who are poetical too late in life never get their senses.”

“I have given up poetry,” said I, “and you cannot scan that communication in your hand.”

“But it is something worse than poetry!  It is prose inflated and puffed and bubbled.  You are falling into your old moony ways again, and sonneteering in plain English.  Are you not ashamed, at your age?”

“What age do you mean?  I feel no infirmities of age.  If my hair is gray, ’tis not with years, as By—­”

“If your hair is gray, it is because you are forty-eight, my old beauty.”

“Forty-five!” I said, with some little natural heat.

“Forty-five let it be, though you have said so these three years.  And what age is that to go running after the foot of the rainbow?  Here you are, my dear Flemming, breathing forth hymns to Spring, and inviting your friends to picnics!  Don’t you know that April is the traitor among the twelve months of the year?  You are ready to strike for Marly in a linen coat and slippers!  Have you forgotten, my poor fellow, that Marly is windy and raw, and that Louis XIV. caught that chill at Marly of which he died?  Ah, Paul, you are right enough.  You are young, still young.  You are not forty-eight:  you are sixteen—­sixteen for the third time.”

Hohenfels, whose once fine temper is going a little, stirred the fire and suddenly rose.

“Lend me an umbrella!” he repeated imperatively.

[Illustration]

“Are you in such a hurry to go?  That is not very complimentary to me,” I observed.  “Have you done scolding me?”

What is called by some my growing worldliness teaches me to value dryness in an old friend as I value dryness in a fine, cobwebbed, crusty wine.  It is from the merest Sybaritism that I surround myself with comrades who, like Hohenfels, can fit their knobs into my pattern, and receive my knobs in their own vacancy.  My hint brought him over at once into the leathern chair opposite the one I occupy.