Peter Hubbard looked at his old friend with the young face and the young body and the eyes that were unhuman--but less so than before. This was a frightful thing that had been done, and by and by he would feel the full horror of it. Right now he was too numb to care. He felt, as Emrys Shortmire must have felt on coming back to Earth, detached and without interest. _But I've felt this way before_, he thought; _it's because I'm old._ "Were you really satisfied with your bargain, Jan?" he asked, almost casually. "Not at first," the boy admitted, sinking down on the couch and clasping his hands around his knees. So young, so graceful, and so ... unnatural. "It seemed to me then that the Morethans had given me youth and taken away humanity. Because, once I found I was physically capable, I found I didn't really want the things I had craved so much before." "So they did trick you?" When all was said and done, Hubbard thought, you could never trust an alien life-form, a foreigner. "No, _no_! You still don't understand. The way I see it is that ... certain elements in us may not mean anything to them. They don't know they're there, so they wouldn't realize that anything got lost in ... the process." "Do you think, Jan," Hubbard asked slowly, "that the way you felt--or didn't feel--might not have anything to do with the Morethans at all? That, for all your young body, you are an old man and feel like an old man?" "Nonsense! I know what it is to feel like an old man, and I know what it is to feel like a young man, and I--I felt like neither." "When a man has lived a certain number of years," Hubbard said, knowing that envy gave the truth relish, "he is an old man. Age is in the mind and heart, not only in the body." "That's a lie!" Then Emrys said, more calmly, "If that's so, why did everything change when I met Megan? Because I found then that my emotions had not been lost! I had a feeling for her that I'd never had for another woman--not even for Alissa, I think. I hadn't imagined there could be a woman like Megan in the world, so sweet and amiable and completely feminine." He looked angrily at Hubbard. "You think I'm sentimental, don't you?" Hubbard tried to smile. "There's nothing wrong with sentiment." But sentimentality was characteristic of an old man's love. Emrys laughed and hugged his knees. He was overdoing the ingenuousness. Of course he deliberately played the part of a boy young enough to be his own great-great-grandson, because he was wooing a woman young enough to be his own great-great-granddaughter. And Hubbard remembered how he himself had attempted to move briskly before Nicholas Dyall. Emrys Shortmire would not have the physical aches that he'd had as a result, but could there be psychical aches? Could an old man ever actually be young? * * * * * Emrys' face grew sober. "I've never touched her, Peter--really touched her, I mean. She's not like other women, you know."