“Twenty has got quite enough individuality for me, thank you!” asserted Barton with some curtness.

“But it hasn’t!” cried the Older Man hotly.  “You’ve just confessed that it hasn’t!” In an amazing impulse of protest he reached out and shook his freckled fist right under the Younger Man’s nose.  “Twenty, I tell you, hasn’t got any individuality at all!” he persisted vehemently.

“Twenty isn’t anything at all except the threadbare cloak of her father’s idiosyncrasies, lined with her mother’s made-over tact, trimmed with her great-aunt somebody’s short-lipped smile, shrouding a brand-new frame of—­God knows what!”

“Eh?  What?” questioned the Younger Man uneasily.

“When a girl is twenty, I tell you,” persisted the Older Man—­“there’s not one marrying man among us—­Heaven help us!—­who can swear whether her charm is Love’s own permanent food or just Nature’s temporary bait!  At twenty, I tell you, there’s not one man among us who can prove whether vivacity is temperament or just plain kiddishness; whether sweetness is real disposition or just coquetry; whether tenderness is personal discrimination or just sex; whether dumbness is stupidity or just brain hoarding its immature treasure; whether indeed coldness is prudery or just conscious passion banking its fires!  The dear daredevil sweetheart whom you worship at eighteen will evolve, likelier than not, into a mighty sour prig at forty; and the dove-gray lass who led you to church with her prayer-book ribbons twice every Sunday will very probably decide to go on the vaudeville stage—­when her children are just in the high school; and the dull-eyed wallflower whom you dodged at all your college dances will turn out, ten chances to one, the only really wonderful woman you know!  But at thirty!  Oh, ye gods, Barton!  If a girl interests you at thirty you’ll be utterly mad about her when she’s forty—­fifty—­sixty!  If she’s merry at thirty, if she’s ardent, if she’s tender, it’s her own established merriment, it’s her own irreducible ardor, it’s her—­Why, man alive!  Why—­why—­”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake!” gasped Barton.  “Whoa there!  Go slow!  How in creation do you expect anybody to follow you?”

“Follow me?  Follow me?” mused the Older Man perplexedly.  Staring very hard at Barton, he took the opportunity to swallow rather loudly once or twice.

“Now speaking of Miss Edgarton,” he resumed persistently, “now, speaking of this Miss Edgarton, I don’t presume for an instant that you’re looking for a wife on this trip, but are merely hankering a bit now and then for something rather specially diverting in the line of feminine companionship?”

“Well, what of it?” conceded the Younger Man.

“This of it,” argued the Older Man.  “If you are really craving the interesting why don’t you go out and rummage around for it?  Rummage around was what I said!  Yes!  The real hundred-cent-to-the-dollar treasures of Life, you know, aren’t apt to be found labeled as such and lying round very loose on the smugly paved general highway!  And astonishingly good looks and astonishingly good clothes are pretty nearly always equivalent to a sign saying, ’I’ve already been discovered, thank you!’ But the really big sport of existence, young man, is to strike out somewhere and discover things for yourself!”