ould never be dated, as if indeed were he to emerge into Piccadilly and
behold suddenly crinolines or even powdered wigs they would not greatly
surprise him. The Albany seemed to have wrung the spirit from the noisy
years that swept on their course outside, to have snatched from each its
heart and in the museum of this decorous glass arcade to have preserved
it immortally, exhibiting the frozen palpitations to a sensitive
observer.

"You're not talking much," said Prescott.

"I was thinking of old plays," said Michael.

Really he was thinking of one old play to which his mother had been
called away by Prescott on a jolly evening forgotten, whose value to
himself had been calculated at half-a-sovereign pressed into his hand.
Michael wished that the play could be going to be acted to-night and
that for half-a-sovereign he could restore to his mother that jolly
evening and that old play and his father. It seemed to him
incommunicably sad, so heavily did the Albany with its dead joys rest
upon his imagination, that people could not like years be frozen into a
perpetual present.

"Don't often go to the theater nowadays," said Prescott. "When Saxby was
alive"--Michael fancied that "alive" was substituted for something that
might have hurt his feelings--"we used to go a lot, but it's dull going
alone."

"Must you go alone?" asked Michael.

"Oh, no, of course I needn't. But I seem to be feeling oldish. Oldish,"
repeated the host.

Michael felt the usurpation of his own youth, but he could not resist
asking whether Prescott thought he was at all like his father, however
sharply this might accentuate the usurpation.

"Oh, yes, I think you are very like," said Prescott. "Good Lord, what a
pity, what a pity! Saxby was always a great stickler for law and order,
you know. He hated anything that seemed irregular or interfered with
things. He hated Radicals, for instance, and motor cars. He had much
more brain than many people thought, but of course," Prescott hurriedly
added, as if he wished to banish the slightest hint of professional
equipment, "of course he always preferred to be perfectly ordinary."

"I like to be ordinary," Michael said; "but I'm not."

"Never knew anybody at your age who was. I remember I tried to write
some poetry about a man who got killed saving a child from being run
over by a train," said Prescott in a tone of wise reminiscence. "You
know, I think you're a very lucky chap," he added. "Here you a