"Nonsense," said David. "I beg your pardon, sir, but isn't it nonsense? Of course, we think of it--a lot more than you do. The chances are about one in twenty that I'll be killed. When you were my age you were planning your career, and college, and you thought you'd be married sometime, and you were getting your name put up at clubs you couldn't get into for years. But fellows of my age aren't making any plans--it would be pretty foolish if we did. We haven't got any future, as you had it. I don't know if you call that thinking about death. I do--thinking about it as a fact, not a horror. We've been up against it for the last four years, and we've got used to it. That's what none of you older people seem to be able to get into your heads. We don't particularly mind the idea of dying. And now I think I'll run home and tell my mother." Neither of the men spoke for a few minutes after he had gone. Mr. Brougham was shocked. He had just caught himself back from telling David that he ought to be afraid of dying--which of course was not at all what he meant. He himself had always feared death--most of the men he knew feared it--only hadn't allowed that fear to influence their actions. He had always regarded this fear as a great universal limitation. He felt as if a great gulf had suddenly opened between him and his son. More than that, he felt that to live free from the terror was too great an emancipation for one so young. "If they're not afraid of death, what are they afraid of?" he found himself thinking. He himself in his youth had never thought about dying--except sometimes in church in connection with music and crowns and glassy seas. Then once, when he was only a little younger than David, he had been very ill in the school infirmary; another boy had died, and then, he remembered, he did for the first time consider the possibility of his, Walter Brougham's, coming to an end, stopping, going out perhaps like a candle. It had been an uncomfortable experience, and when his mother had come to take care of him he had distinctly clung to her--as if she could have done any good. Had these boys gone through that and come out on the other side? He found it alarmed him to think that David wasn't afraid. Good heavens, what would they do--this new generation, young and healthy and unafraid of death, not because they had never thought about it but because they had been familiar with it since they went into long trousers? Mr. Granby broke the silence. He said: "To order ourselves lowly and reverently to all our betters?" Brougham was puzzled by these words, and he felt that it was no time for puzzling him. "Did you think David was impertinent to me, Mr. Granby?" he asked. "Is that what you meant?" "No, that isn't what I meant, Mr. Brougham."