Kenny obeyed.  He looked a little white.

“I’ve tried to think this thing out fairly,” said Whitaker.  “Why as a parent for Brian you’re a failure—­”

“Well?”

“And the first and fundamental cause of your failure is, I think, your hairbrained, unquenchable youth.”

Kenny stared at him in astounded silence.

“I remember once around the fire here you told a Celtic tale of some golden islands—­Tirnanoge, wasn’t it?—­the Land of the Young—­”

Might have been, Kenny said perversely.  He didn’t remember.

“Ossian lived there with the daughter of the King of Youth for three hundred years that seemed but three,” reminded Whitaker.  “Well, no matter.  The point is this:  The Land of the Young and the King of Youth always make me think of you.”

“It is true,” said Kenny with biting sarcasm, “that I still have hair and teeth.  It is also true that I am the respectable if unsuccessful parent of a son twenty-three years old and I myself am forty-four.”

“Forty-four years young,” admitted Whitaker.  “And Brian on the other hand is twenty-three years old.  There you have it.  You know precisely what I mean, Kenny.  Youth isn’t always a matter of years.  It’s a state of being.  Sometimes it’s an affliction and sometimes a gift.  Sometimes it’s chronic and sometimes it’s contagious enough to start an epidemic.  You’re as young and irresponsible as the wind.  You’ve never grown up.  God knows whether or not you ever will.  But Brian has.  There’s the clash.”

“Go on,” said Kenny with a dangerous flash of interest in his eyes.  “You’ve an undeniable facility, John, with what you call the truth.”

“It’s an unfortunate characteristic of highly temperamentalized individuals—­”

“Painters, Irishmen and O’Neills,” put in Kenny with sulky impudence.

“That they frequently skirt the rocks for themselves with amazing skill.  I mean just this:  They don’t always shipwreck their own lives.”

Was that, Kenny would like to know, an essential of successful parenthood?

“I mean,” he paraphrased dryly, “must you wreck your own life, John, to parent somebody else with skill?” The wording of this rather pleased him.  He brightened visibly.

Whitaker ignored his brazen air of assurance.  It was like Kenny, he reflected, to find an unexpected loophole and emerge from it with the air of a conqueror.

“People with an over-plus of temperament,” he said, “wreck the lives of others.  Brian has just stepped out in the nick of time.”

“You mean,” flashed Kenny with anger in his eyes, “you mean I’ve tried to wreck the life of my own son?  By the powers of war, John, that’s too much!”

“I didn’t say you had tried.  I mean merely that you were accidentally succeeding.  The sunsets—­”

“Damn the sunsets!” roared Kenny, losing his head.

“It was time for that,” agreed Whitaker.