"A girl is mature at eighteen--mature enough. I won't talk of that, George. We are discussing my age, and I tell you that I have something better than even the specialist's word to stand on: I have the knowledge of my own careful, healthy, abstemious life. I am sounder in body than hundreds and hundreds of what you would call average New Yorkers of twenty-one. I am sounder than their average. More than that, I have done something that most of them have not done: I have kept fresh and unimpaired the tastes, the appetites, the spirit of that age." "You mean you believe you have." "I know it." "How can you know it until you try? And you won't try till you've committed yourself, Jim." Stainton shook his great head. "At this moment," he said, "I'm in twice better health--mental, moral, physical and every other way--understand me: _every other way_--than you were ten years ago." "Certainly," Holt cheerfully admitted, "I'm past salvation; everybody knows that; but you----" "I have never been a waster." "That's just it. It'd be better for you if you had." "You don't mean that." "In this mix-up, yes I do. Not much, you know. Just a little picnic now and then." "Modern medicine has knocked that theory into a cocked hat." "Has it, Jim? All right. But a man that's been a long time in a close room can stand the close room a bit longer than a fellow that's just come in from the open air. You've formed habits. Fine habits, I grant you that, but you've formed 'em; they're fixed, just as fixed as my bad ones are. You've come to depend on 'em, even if you don't know it. Your brain is used to 'em. So's your body--only more so. Well, what's going to happen when you change 'em all of a sudden--habits of a lifetime, mind you? That's what I want to know: what's going to happen?" "You talk," said Stainton, "as if every man that married, married under the age of forty-five." "I talk," Holt retorted, "as if no man of fifty married for his own good a girl of eighteen." Stainton's fist clenched. His face flushed crimson. His steel-grey eyes narrowed. He raised a tight hand. Then, with the fist in mid-air, his mood changed. He mastered himself. The fist opened. The hand descended gently. Stainton chuckled. "You don't know what you're talking about," he said. "I forgive you because I know you are speaking only out of your friendship for me." He hesitated. "That is, unless----" He frowned again, but only slightly--"unless you yourself," he interrogatively concluded, "happen to feel toward Miss Stannard as I do?" Holt relieved him there. It was his turn to laugh, and he laughed heartily. "O, Lord, no!" said he. "Make yourself easy about that, old man. I've got just enough to live on comfortably by myself without exercising too much economy, and if I ever marry it will have to be a woman that can give me the luxuries I can't get otherwise."