"For myself what is there? The world that was mine is gone, is burnt up, destroyed. But for you, for you and Henry and the great company with you. Golly! What a time!"
He mopped his brow. He looked at Millie and laughed.
"Please forgive me," he said. "I haven't let myself go like this for years!"
Millie's sympathy was, for the moment, stronger than her vocabulary, her sympathy, that is, for the earlier part of his declaration. As he recounted to her his own story she had been readily, eagerly carried away, feeling the absolute truth of everything that he said, responding to all his trouble and his loneliness. When he had spoken of his boy she had almost loved him, the maternal in her coming out so that she longed to put her arms round him and comfort him. He seemed, as every man seems to every woman, at such a time, himself a child younger than she, more helpless than any woman. But at the end he had swung her on to another mood. She did not know that she liked being addressed as The Young. She felt in this, as she had always before felt with him, that there was something a little priggish, a little laughable in his earnestness. She did not see herself in any group with thousands of other young men and young women. She was not sure that she felt young at all--and in any case she was simply Millicent Trenchard with Millicent Trenchard's body, ambitions and purposes. She had also instinctively the Trenchard distrust of all naked emotions nakedly displayed. This she was happily to conquer--but not yet.
She felt finally as though she were a specimen in a glass jar, set up on the laboratory table, and that the professor was beginning:
"You will now notice that we have an excellent specimen of The Young. . . ."
Then she looked at him and saw how deeply in earnest he was, and that he himself was feeling true British embarrassment at his unforeseen demonstration. This called forth her maternal emotions again. He was a dear old thing--a little childish, a little old and odd, but he needed her help and her sympathy.
"I'll tell you," she said, "I don't think it's very much good putting us all into lumps like that. For instance, you couldn't place Mary Cass and myself in the same division, however hard you tried. If you are going simply by years, then that's absurd, because Mary is years older than I am in some things and years younger in others. One's just as old as one feels," she added with deep profundity, as though she were stating something quite new and fresh that had never been said before.