certainly there was a moment , after the greeting , when they both gave me long , hard looks and i wondered whether those looks were as much to gawp at my clothes as to see the change in me , because the fact was that i had been but a boy when i first met them , but i had grown from a feckless , arrogant teenager , an errant son , a love-lorn but unreliable husband into something else-a man scarred and made hard by battle , who was not quite so careless with his feelings , not so liberal with his emotions , a cold man in many respects , a man whose true passions were buried deep .