The older man had a friendly smile for the facetious intention of this.  “I guess I won’t have anything that’d be worth locking doors on,” he said.  He looked about him still smiling, his pleasant old eyes full of a fresh satisfaction in what he saw.  The room was charming to his gaze, cheerful and homey.  “I don’t believe I’m going to have anything to complain of, with the folks that live in this house,” he said, “any more than with any of the rest of it.”

The other nodded.  “Yes, it’s a very good room,” he agreed.  After a longer inspection, he added with a slight accent of surprise, “An oddly good room; stunning!  Look at the color in those curtains and the walls, and the arrangement of those prints over that Chippendale sewing-table.  I wonder if it’s accidental.  You wouldn’t think you’d find anybody up here who could achieve it consciously.”

He got to his feet with a vigorous precision of movement which the other admired.  “Well, he’s grown to be considerable of a man,” he thought to himself.  “A pity his father couldn’t have lived to see it, all that aliveness that had bothered them so much, down at last where he’s got his grip on it.  And enough of it, plenty of it, oceans of it, left so that he is still about forty times more alive than anybody else.”  He looked tolerantly with his tired elderly amusement at the other, stepping about, surveying the room and every object in it.

The younger brought himself up short in front of a framed photograph.  “Why, here’s a chateau-fort I don’t know!” he said with an abrupt accent.  He added, with some vehemence, “I never even heard of it, I’m sure.  And it’s authentic, evidently.”

The older man sat perfectly still.  He did not know what a shatto four was, nor had he the slightest desire to ask and bring the information down on him, given as the other would give it, pressingly, vividly, so that you had to listen whether you wanted to or not.  Heaven knew he did not want to know about whatever it was, this time.  Not about that, nor anything else.  He only wanted to rest and have a little life before it was too late.  It was already too late for any but the quietest sort.  But that was no matter.  He wouldn’t have liked the other kind very well probably.  He certainly had detested the sort of “life” he’d experienced in business.  The quietest sort was what he had always wanted and never got.  And now it really seemed as though he was going to have it.  For all his fatigued pose in the old arm-chair, his heart beat faster at the idea.  He hadn’t got used to being free yet.  He’d heard people say that when you were first married it was like that, you couldn’t realize it.  He’d heard one of the men at the office say that for a long time, every time he heard his bride’s skirts rustle, he had to turn his head to make sure she was really there.  Well, he would like now to get up and look out of that window and see if his garden was really there. His garden! He thought with a secret