“I came at once, you see, my dear. If I had not roused myself, I’d never have done it. As soon as I’d read your letter I rang for Tomlin, told her to pack and wire for places, and behold, me!”
“You look completely done up and frightfully tired.”
“I’m always done up and tired now; the fact is, Letty, I’m an old woman.”
“Oh, don’t! You are not,” protested Letty with unusual warmth.
“Yes, I am; my heart and brain may feel young, but my body is aged. Age is a strange thing; it creeps after us for years, and we go marching on, imagining our youth or middle life will last. All at once, as in a night, age springs out and seizes you—you look at yourself in the glass, and it’s there,—or you hear it. And I can assure you it is a shock! Some years ago I was waiting to be served in a hairdresser’s, and I overheard a man say to another:
“‘You go—take the old lady first.’
“Until then I’d always thought myself merely middle-aged; but I looked in the glass as the man dressed my hair, and I said to myself, ‘He is right. You are an old lady.’ Once people used to stand up and give me their seats, because I was lovely; now, when they do this, it is merely because I am venerable,” and she sighed profoundly. “And you, Letty, have the gift of perpetual youth!”
“No, indeed; but I must say when I’m with you I feel almost a girl, and when with Cara, I’m an elderly woman.”
“You are close on thirty-five and yet you look seven-and-twenty—even in broad daylight. Your calm, healthful, uneventful life, has preserved your beauty. Such an existence would have driven me mad. One day my body would have been fished out of the lake.”
“No, they are never found; the lake is pitiless.”