be happy? You were always the wisest person in the world. What is it, can’t you tell me?”
“I can’t altogether tell myself, Lillian. It’s not wholly a matter of the calendar. It’s the feeling that I’ve put a great deal behind me, where I can’t go back to it again—and I don’t really wish to go back. The way would be too long and too fatiguing. Perhaps, for a home-staying man, I’ve lived pretty hard. I wasn’t willing to slight anything—you, or my desk, or my students. And now I seem to be tremendously tired. One pays, coming or going. A man has got only just so much in him; when it’s gone he slumps. Even the first Napoleon did.”
They both laughed. That was an old joke—the Professor’s darkest secret. At the font he had been christened Napoleon Godfrey St. Peter. There had always been a Napoleon in the family, since a remote grandfather got his discharge from the Grande Armée. Godfrey had abbreviated his name in Kansas, and even his daughters didn’t know what it had been originally.
“I think, you know,” he told his wife as he rose to go to bed, “that I’ll get my second wind. But for the present I don’t want anything very stimulating. Paris is too beautiful, and too full of memories.”