"Then, considering how you have run after death and sidestepped old age, it looks to me as if----" "Thank you, George; but, if you will only listen a little longer, I think you will understand. While I was still very small, my father--he drove about on his professional calls in a buggy: the old-fashioned way--was kicked in the head by his horse. He never really recovered, and yet, for a long time, he was not in a condition that peremptorily demanded treatment. What actually resulted was a disease rare enough, I dare say, but quite well known: he developed premature and rapid senility. It all happened, once it got under way, in six months. In that time I saw him--I, a mere boy--become, day by day, a doting idiot. "Young as I was, I called in, of my own initiative, a Boston specialist. "'There is nothing to do, my boy,' he told me, 'except wait for the end. Meanwhile make your father as comfortable as you can. What you see going on in him is just what begins to go on in every human being from the moment of birth: Old Age. Here, of course, it is specialised and malignantly accelerated. It is senility; that is to say, it is, though here abnormally magnified, an essentially normal phenomenon. Old age, my boy; old age.'" Stainton wet his lips with wine. "I can see the specialist yet as he said it," he presently went on, "and I am not likely to forget what it made me feel. There must have been some neighbour about at the time, or the housekeeper, but it remains in my memory as an interview between him and me alone. I did the only thing to be done: I bore it. I hated to have my father sent to an institution--which shows that I was very young indeed,--and so I simply nursed him along, the housekeeper and I doing the best we could. "It was ugly, and it got worse every day. We could see it get worse. It was--it was Hell. There are things, lots of them, about it that I just couldn't tell you. I lived in a fascinated terror, and all the time I kept saying to myself: "'This is the same thing that's going on in everyone I see. It's going on in me. It's getting farther and farther along in me with every tick of my watch. It's what is crawling toward me out of the dark corners of the years to come.'" Stainton stopped again, barely to sip his champagne. "That," he said, "is how I came to be afraid of Old Age." Holt shuffled his feet. "A horse-kick isn't hereditary," he said.