“Good morning, father,” said Tommy, and had a sense of having left his salutation unfinished. He breakfasted in a sober, business-like way, feeling age creeping upon him. Nevertheless, when he had finished he hesitated to light a cigarette. He never had done it in the house, for his father had expressed the wish that his son should not smoke until he was of age. Tommy's twenty-first birthday had come off at college. Well, he was of age now. The smell of the vile thing made Mr. Leigh look at his son, frowning. Then he ceased to frown. “Ah yes,” he observed, meditatively, “you are of age. You are a man now.” “I suspect I am, father,” said Thomas, pleasantly. “In fact, I--” “Then it is time you heard man's talk!” Mr. Leigh took out his watch, looked at it, and put it back in his pocket with a methodical leisureliness that made Tommy realize that Mr. Leigh was a very old man, though he could not be more than fifty. Tommy was silent, and was made subtly conscious that in not speaking he was somehow playing safe. “Thomas, I have treated you as a boy during twenty-one years.” Mr. Leigh paused just long enough for Tommy to wonder why he had not added “and three months.” Mr. Leigh went on, with that same uncomfortable, senile precision: “Your mother would have wished it. You are a man now and--” He closed his lips abruptly, but without any suggestion of temper or of making a sudden decision, and rose, a bit stiffly. His face took on a look of grim resolution that filled Tommy with that curious form of indeterminate remorse with which we anticipate abstract accusations against which there is no concrete defense. It seemed to make an utter stranger of Mr. Leigh. Tommy saw before him a life with which his own did not merge. He would have preferred a scolding as being more paternal, more humanly flesh-and-blood. He was not frightened. He never had been wild; at the worst he had been a complacent shirker of future responsibilities, with that more or less adventurous desire to float on the tide that comes to American boys whose financial necessities do not compel them to fix their anchorage definitely. At college such boys are active citizens in their community, concerned with sports and class politics, and the development of their immemorial strategy against existing institutions. And for the same sad reason of youth Tommy could not possibly know that he was now standing, not on a rug in his father's dining-room, but on the top of life's first hill, with a pleasant valley below him--and one steep mountain beyond. All that his quick self-scrutinizing could do was to end in wondering which particular exploit, thitherto deemed unknown to his father, was to be the key-note of the impending speech. And for the life of him, without seeking self-extenuation, he could not think of any serious enough to bring so grimly determined a look on his father's face.