Page:Birthright.djvu/220

 persistent labor. Indeed, all old gentlemen are prone to choose the most personable and virile young man they can find for themselves to have been like.

The two men had little to say to each other. Their thoughts beat to such different tempos that any attempt at continued speech discovered unequal measures. As a matter of fact, in all comfortable human conversation, words are used as mere buoys dropped here and there to mark well-known channels of thought and feeling. Similarity of mental topography is necessary to mutual understanding. Between any two generations the landscape is so changed as to be unrecognizable. Our fathers are monarchists; our sons, bolsheviki.

Old Rose Hobbett was more of an age with the Captain, and these two talked very comfortably as the old virago came and went with food at meal-time. For instance, the Captain always asked his servant if she had fed his cat, and old Rose invariably would sulk and poke out her lips and put off answering to the last possible moment of insolence, then would grumble out that she was jes 'bout to feed the varmint, an' 't wuz funny nobody couldn't give a hard-wuckin' colored woman breathin'-space to turn roun' in.

This reply was satisfactory to the Captain, because he knew what it meant,—that Rose had half forgotten the cat, and had meant wholly to forget it, but since she had been snapped up, so to speak, in the very act of forgetting, she would dole it out a piece or two of the