“You’re not being serious,” said Martin; “and if you can’t be serious about a game you can’t be serious about anything. That is a universal truth. I discovered it. What do you suppose matters to me most in my life? Music? Not at all. Get along with you, you silly thing. But, oh, if any one would teach me to do back brackets not rather clean, but quite clean. I dreamed I did one once, and I awoke sobbing loudly from sheer happiness. I would sign a pledge never to touch tobacco or a piano again, if I could do that. That’s my real state of mind. Now, will you skate to-morrow at Prince’s? I can be there at ten for an hour.” “Considering I am always there at half-past nine,” remarked Stella, “I don’t think you need ask. And yet you say I am not serious. Oh, Martin, why is it that one really only wants to do the things one can’t do?” “You can if you want enough,” said he. “The deuce is that one can’t always want enough.” “I don’t believe that,” said she promptly,--Lady Monica would have stayed her devastating hand, if she had heard this,--“I want lots of things as much as I possibly can.” “But perhaps even that isn’t enough. What, for instance?” Stella could not help a momentary lifting of her eyes to his. “Why, to skate, silly,” she said. “Yes, I’ll be there by ten, and so be punctual. I will consider my foot whatever you wish, and I’ll fall down as often as you think necessary. But don’t be unkind at once when you pick me up, and tell me I was too much on my heel, or anything of that sort. Wait till the first agony is over. I attend best when the pain is beginning to pass off.” “Well, I only tell you to save trouble in the future,” said he. “I know, but give me a moment. Do you care about the future much, by the way? I don’t. Give me the immediate present. To think much about the future is a sign of age. No one begins to care about the future until he is too old to have any. Besides, it implies that the present has ceased to be absorbing.” Martin pondered this. “Oh, no; I don’t think that is so at all.” Stella laughed. “You never, by any chance, agree with a word I say,” she remarked. “Well, you haven’t agreed with me since August,” he said. “I made a note of it. But that is why we have no stupid pauses. All conversation runs dry in two minutes if one agrees with the other person. But what you say about age really isn’t so. Look at Karl Rusoff or Lady Sunningdale. They both live intensely in the present.” “Ah, you are shallow,” she said. “Years have got nothing whatever to do with age. That is the most superficial view. People of ninety die young, people of twenty die of senile decay.” Martin stretched his trouser over his crossed knee. “I am a hundred and eleven,” he said, “and whiles--don’t you hate the Scotch--and whiles I am about twelve in an Eton collar.”