“Nicky always was a dear boy—­even at his most elusive.  Jim is more human than Nicky was at his age, but he hasn’t Nicky’s charm, that something of a piskie’s changeling that made Nicky so attractive.  Yes, he’s a ‘good son,’ to use your horrible expression, Judy.  And Marjorie is a very good wife for him, though I must say I enjoy it when I can have the two boys, the big and the little one, to myself.”

“I sometimes wonder how much you ever really liked women,” said Judy.

“I have always liked them, as you call it, very much indeed.  But I don’t think I’ve ever thought of them as women first and foremost, but as human beings more or less like unto myself.”

“That’s where you’ve made your mistake.  Not because they aren’t—­for they are—­but because that destroys the mystery, and no one is keener on keeping up the idea that women are mysterious creatures, unlike men, than women themselves.”

“I daresay you’re right.  But to look at, merely externally, I’ve always been able to get the mystery.  They can look so that a man is afraid to touch such exquisite, ethereal creatures, all the time that they’re wanting to be touched most.  Georgie always used to say I never understood women.”

“When she meant that you showed your understanding too clearly.  Dear Georgie!”

“Yes, dear Georgie!  It does seem rough luck that she should have gone the first when she was so much younger than I, doesn’t it?”

“Rough luck on you, or on her, are you meaning at the moment?”

“At the moment I was meaning on her.  She was so in love with life.  But I suppose really on me.  I might, humanly speaking, have been fairly sure that I should have had her as a companion all the last years.”

“Do you find it very lonely since Ruth married her tame clergyman and Lissa went away to become a full-blown painter?”

“Doesn’t it always have to be lonely?  Isn’t it always really?  The only thing is that when we are young we have distractions which prevent us seeing it.  We can cheat ourselves with physical contact that makes us think it possible to fuse with any one other human being.  But it isn’t.  When we are our age—­well, we know it’s always isolated, but that it doesn’t matter.”

“What does matter?  Those to come?”

“Yes, those to come—­always them first; yet not that alone, or there would be no more value in them than in ourselves if it were always to be a vicious circle like that.  Each individual soul is equally important, the old as much as the young, in the eternal scheme.  It is only in the economy of this world that youth is more important than age.”

“I think I can fairly lay claim to being a broadminded ‘’vert’” said Judith, “but of course, you know, I can’t help feeling I’ve got something in the way of what makes things worth while that you haven’t?”

“Yes, I know you do.  I see you’re bound to have.  But of course, owing to what the Parson inculcated into me, I think I’ve got it too, but I quite see I can’t expect you to think so.”