Mrs. Pray nodded her head solemnly.
"I said that," she returned. "I said that to Jonathan when I come home from the Circle the day they was here talkin' over the fund an' settlin' what they'd do. I come home an' says to Jonathan wipin' his hands on the roller-towel there by the back door, I says, 'What's everybody got ag'inst growin' old, an' growin' hefty, too, for that matter?' I says. 'Seems if folks don't talk about nothin' else.'"
Martha put in her assuaging word.
"Well, I guess human natur' ain't changed much. I guess nobody ever hankered after gettin' stiff j'ints an' losin' their eyesight an' so. 'Twould be a queer kind of a shay that was lookin' for'ard to goin' to pieces while 'twas travelin' along. Mis' Denny's niece that reads in public read me that piece once. I thought 'twas about the cutest that ever was."
Ellen Bayliss had laid her sewing on her knee, and now she looked up in an impulsive haste, the color in her cheeks and a quick moving note in her voice.
"It isn't growing old that's the trouble. It's talking about it. Why, the night after that meeting of the Circle—" She stopped here, and her eyes, widening and growing darker in a way they had, gave her face almost a look of terror.
"What is it, Ellen?" asked Martha Waterman kindly. "You tell it right out."
"Why," said Ellen, "this is all 'twas. That night at supper, my Nellie kept staring at me across the table. 'What is 't, Nellie?' I says, at last. Then she colored up and says, not as if she wanted to, but as if she couldn't help it, 'I hope I shall look like you sometime, aunt Ellen.' You see how 'twas. She meant, when she was old. She never in her life had thought anything about me being old, and they'd put it into her head."
A pained look settled upon her face, and before she took up her sewing again she glanced from one to another as if to ask them if they really understood. There was a little warm murmur of assent. Ellen was beloved, and there was, besides, a concurrent strain of sympathy through the assembly who had known all her past. They remembered how Colonel Hadley had "gone with her" awhile when she was teaching school at District Number Four, and how Ellen had faded out, the summer he was married to Kate Leighton, of the Leightons on the hill. Now his nephew, Clyde, was going with Ellen's niece in a way that vividly mirrored the old time, and they had heard that the colonel, when he came for one of his brief visits in the summer, had somehow put a check to love's beginning. At least, Clyde had seen Nellie only once after his uncle went away, and had speedily closed the old house and followed him.
"There, Ellen," said Lydia Vesey, from a rare softness. "I guess nobody'd ever say 't you was growin' old. They'd only think you was sort o' palin' out, that's all, same 's a white dress is different from a pink one."