at should you consider too old, Nicky?" asked Ishmael.

Nicky hesitated; he made a rapid calculation in his head, and arriving
at the fact that his father must be quite forty-six or seven, and being
always averse to hurting anyone's feelings unless it was very worth
while, he temporised.

"Oh, well! it depends on the fellow, doesn't it? I expect, for instance,
you weren't nearly as old as me when you were my age, because you didn't
go to the 'Varsity, and of course that makes a difference...."

Ishmael sat smoking and looking at the boy in silence. He felt he knew
what the old Bible phrase meant when it spoke of yearning over a child.
He felt the helpless desire to protect, to stand between this golden boy
and all that must come to him, and he knew that not only can no one live
for anyone else, but that youth would refuse the gift were it possible
to make it.

Nicky, about whom he knew so little, about whom he realised he had
always known so little.... What did he really know about Nicky's life,
his doings up at Oxford, his thoughts? Roughly he was aware of his
tastes, his habits at home, his affections; but of the other Nicky, the
individual that stood towards life, not the boy who stood in his
relation of son towards him, he knew nothing. Women, now ... what lay
behind that smooth lean young face--what of knowledge about women?
Ishmael had no means of telling. Whether Nicky were still as pure as his
two little sisters, whether he had the technical purity that may for
some time go with a certain amount of curiosity and corruption of the
mind, whether he had already had his "adventures," or whether he were
still too undeveloped, too immersed in sports and himself to have
bothered about women, Ishmael could not really tell, any more than could
any other parent.

The only thing in which Ishmael differed from the average parent was in
acknowledging his ignorance to himself. But then Nicky had always had
that curious intangible quality, that mental slipping-away from all
grip, which had made it especially difficult ever really to know what
his thoughts were and what he really knew. Not that there was any
reserve about Nicky--he was not at all averse to talking freely about
himself; but it seemed as though either there were in him a hollow where
most people keep the root of self, or else that a very deep-seated
personality held court there. Whichever it was, the effect was the same,
the effect as of a sealed place.

F