Up in his room he saw his reflection in the familiar mirror he went closer and examined his own face with anxiety, comparing it after a moment with a photograph of himself in uniform taken just before the war.
Good Lord! he said aloud. The process was continuing. There was no doubt of it he looked now like a man of thirty. Instead of being delighted, he was uneasy he was growing younger. He had hitherto hoped that once he reached a bodily age equivalent to his age in years, the grotesque phenomenon which had marked his birth would cease to function. He shuddered. His destiny seemed to him awful, incredible.
When he came downstairs Hildegarde was waiting for him. She appeared annoyed, and he wondered if she had at last discovered that there was something amiss. It was with an effort to relieve the tension between them that he broached the matter at dinner in what he considered a delicate way.
Well, he remarked lightly, everybody says I look younger than ever.
Hildegarde regarded him with scorn. She sniffed. Do you think its anything to boast about?
Im not boasting, he asserted uncomfortably.
She sniffed again. The idea, she said, and after a moment: I should think youd have enough pride to stop it.
How can I? he demanded.
Im not going to argue with you, she retorted. But theres a right way of doing things and a wrong way. If youve made up your mind to be different from everybody else, I dont suppose I can stop you, but I really dont think its very considerate.
But, Hildegarde, I cant help it.
You can too. Youre simply stubborn. You think you dont want to be like anyone else. You always have been that way, and you always will be. But just think how it would be if everyone else looked at things as you do what would the world be like?
As this was an inane and unanswerable argument Benjamin made no reply, and from that time on a chasm began to widen between them. He wondered what possible fascination she had ever exercised over him.
To add to the breach, he found, as the new century gathered headway, that his thirst for gaiety grew stronger. Never a party of any kind in the city of Baltimore but he was there, dancing with the prettiest of the young married women, chatting with the most popular of the debutantes, and finding their company charming, while his wife, a dowager of evil omen, sat among the chaperons, now in haughty disapproval, and now following him with solemn, puzzled, and reproachful eyes.
Look! people would remark. What a pity! A young fellow that age tied to a woman of forty-five. He must be twenty years younger than his wife. They had forgotten as people inevitably forget that back in 1880 their mammas and papas had also remarked about this same ill-matched pair.
Benjamins growing unhappiness at home was compensated for by his many new interests. He took up golf and made a great success of it. He went in for dancing: in 1906 he was an expert at The Boston, and in 1908 he was considered proficient at the Maxixe, while in 1909 his Castle Walk was the envy of every young man in town.
Benjamins growing unhappiness at home was compensated for by his many new interests. He took up golf and made a great success of it. He went in for dancing: in 1906 he was an expert at The Boston, and in 1908 he was considered proficient at the Maxixe, while in 1909 his Castle Walk was the envy of every young man in town.
His social activities, of course, interfered to some extent with his business, but then he had worked hard at wholesale hardware for twenty-five years and felt that he could soon hand it on to his son, Roscoe, who had recently graduated from Harvard.
He and his son were, in fact, often mistaken for each other. This pleased Benjamin he soon forgot the insidious fear which had come over him on his return from the Spanish-American War, and grew to take a naпve pleasure in his appearance. There was only one fly in the delicious ointment he hated to appear in public with his wife. Hildegarde was almost fifty, and the sight of her made him feel absurd.
9
One September day in 1910 a few years after Roger Button & Co., Wholesale Hardware, had been handed over to young Roscoe Button a man, apparently about twenty years old, entered himself as a freshman at Harvard University in Cambridge. He did not make the mistake of announcing that he would never see fifty again, nor did he mention the fact that his son had been graduated from the same institution ten years before.
He was admitted, and almost immediately attained a prominent position in the class, partly because he seemed a little older than the other freshmen, whose average age was about eighteen.
But his success was largely due to the fact that in the football game with Yale he played so brilliantly, with so much dash and with such a cold, remorseless anger that he scored seven touchdowns and fourteen field goals for Harvard, and caused one entire eleven of Yale men to be carried singly from the field, unconscious. He was the most celebrated man in college.
Strange to say, in his third or junior year he was scarcely able to make the team. The coaches said that he had lost weight, and it seemed to the more observant among them that he was not quite as tall as before. He made no touchdowns indeed, he was retained on the team chiefly in hope that his enormous reputation would bring terror and disorganisation to the Yale team.