Since then, years, as impatient novelists so often inform us, passed. Babs’s philosophy of life was excellent as far as it went, and the only objection to it was that it did not go far enough. In spite of his vitality, Charlie did not, as a sensible young man should, see about getting another girl; for perhaps he was wounded a little deeper than either he or Babs knew. The tragedy about it all is that they both had the constitution of grizzly [Illustration: _The Grizzly Kittens._] kittens. He did not marry any one else, nor did he live into his age as that slowly increased upon him, and Mr. Begum got asthma. This made him very tiresome and wheezy, and the perpetual contact with senility probably prevented Babs from growing into her proper mould of increasing years. Her sense of youth was constantly fed by her husband’s venerable habits; with him she always felt a girl. And the ruthless decades proceeded in their Juggernaut march, without her ever seeing the toppling car that now overhangs her, stiff with the wooden images of age. Wooden, at any rate, they will seem to her when she fully perceives them, and robbed of the graciousness and wisdom that might have clothed and softened them if only she had admitted their advent. As it is, two pathetic figures confront us. Charlie Gordon, that slim entrancing youth, is just as slim (in fact slimmer in the wrong places) as he ever was. But he is a shade less entrancing, with his mincing entry into the assembling party than he was twenty-five years ago. There was no need for him to mince then, for his eager footsteps carried him, as with Hermes-heels, on the wings of youth. Now he takes little quick steps, and thinks it is the same thing. He is just as light and spry as ever (except when he is troubled with lumbago) but he cannot see that it is not the same thing. He has not noticed that his lean youthful jaw has a queer little fold in the side of it, and if he notices it, he thinks it is a dimple. He brushes his hair very carefully now, not knowing that to the disinterested observer the top of his head looks rather like music-paper, with white gaps in between the lines, and that it is quite obvious that he grows those thinning locks very long on one side of his head (just above the ear) and trains them in the manner of an espaliered pear over the denuded bone where once a plume used jauntily to erect itself. He is careful about them now, but once, not so very long ago, he forgot how delicately trained were those tresses, and went down to bathe with the other boys of the house. They naturally came detached from their proper place, and streamed after him as he swam, like the locks of a Rhine-maiden. It was rather terrible. But such as they are, they are still glossy raven black: there is not the smallest hint of grey anywhere about them.