Might be eighty when he's like that....

They're all like it when they're young." With a sigh he translated himself back into this new, tiresome existence.
V But after that morning things were never again quite the same.

He gave himself up deliberately to the new life.
With that serious devotion towards anything likely to be of real practical value to him that was, in his later years, never to fail him, he attacked this business of "words." He discovered that if he made certain sounds when certain things were said to him he provoked instant applause.

He liked popularity; he liked the rewards that popularity brought him.

He acquired a formula that amounted practically to "Wash dat ?" And whenever he saw anything new he produced his question.