"I'm an old woman, Billy." She wrinkled up her eyes in a delightful way she had. "Don't you think that's funny?"
Billy with difficulty crossed one leg over the other, helping it with a plump hand.
"You're precisely what you always were."
His round, comfortable voice at once put her where she liked to be, in the field of an unconsidered intercourse with man. Electra, she knew, was too much with her, but she had forgotten how invigorating these brisk yet kindly breezes were, from the other planets. "That's what I came over to see about," Billy was saying, with a rakish eye. "I needn't have taken the trouble. You're as little changed as that syringa bush."
Her brilliant face softened into something wistful.
"The bush will come into bloom in a few weeks, Billy," she reminded him. "I shan't ever bloom again."
"Boo to a goose!" said Billy. "You're in bloom now."
The wistfulness was gone. She adjusted her glasses on her nose and eyed him sharply.
"I think too much about old age," she said. "I regard mine as a kind of mildew, and every day and forty times a day I peer at myself to see if the mildew's growing thicker. But you don't seem to have any mildew, Billy. You're just a different kind of person from what you were fifty years ago. You haven't gone bad at all."
Billy set his correct feet together on the floor, rose, and, with his hand on his heart, made her a bow.