ctim has
walked the plank--does he doze on a sunny bench beneath his pear tree?
Is no blood or treasure left upon the earth? Do all rascals lose their
teeth? "Good evening, Elmer," I said, "it has been a long time since
we have met." And I left him agreeable and smiling.

No, certainly I do not brood upon my age. Except for a gift I forget
my birthday. It is only by an effort that I can think of myself as
running toward middle age. If I meet a stranger, usually, by a
pleasant deception, I think myself the younger, and because of an
old-fashioned deference for age I bow and scrape in the doorway for
his passage.

Of course I admit a suckling to be my junior. A few days since I
happened to dine at one of the Purple Pups of our Greenwich Village.
At my table, which was slashed with yellow and blue in the fashion of
these places, sat a youth of seventeen who engaged me in conversation.
Plainly, even to my blindness, he was younger than myself. The milk
was scarcely dry upon his mouth. He was, by his admission across the
soup, a writer of plays and he had received already as many as three
pleasant letters of rejection. He flared with youth. Strange gases and
opinion burned in his speech. His breast pocket bulged with
manuscript, for reading at a hint.

I was poking at my dumpling when he asked me if I were a socialist.
No, I replied. Then perhaps I was an anarchist or a Bolshevist, he
persisted. N-no, I answered him, sadly and slowly, for I foresaw his
scorn. He leaned forward across the table. Begging my pardon for an
intrusion in my affairs, he asked me if I were not aware that the
world was slipping away from me. God knows. Perhaps. I had come
frisking to that restaurant. I left it broken and decrepit. The
youngster had his manuscripts and his anarchy. He held the wriggling
world by its futuristic tail. It was not my world, to be sure, but it
was a gay world and daubed with color.

And yet, despite this humiliating encounter, I feel quite young.
Something has passed before me that may be Time. The summers have come
and gone. There is snow on the pavement where I remember rain. I see,
if I choose, the long vista of the years, with diminishing figures,
and tin soldiers at the start. Yet I doubt if I am growing older. To
myself I seem younger than in my twenties. In the twenties we are
quite commonly old. We bear the whole weight of society. The world has
been waiting so long for us and our remedies. In the twenties we