Instincts that she had thought long dead were lifting their heads within her; too strong to be beaten down at once. For the life of her the woman could not help dallying with that passing moment to which every woman alive cries out within herself, "Oh stay! Thou art so fair——"
Aloud she said (truthfully enough, but in a sense that he did not follow), "I might not want to marry you if you were older."
"Why not? Why not? The other day in the wood you said it was my age that you barred," he went on, persistently. "It isn't that you don't like me, is it? Is it? If you just happened to be my own age, then, you'd take me, wouldn't you?"
Would she? Ah, wouldn't she, she thought, vainly. And again for the life of her she could not keep that subtlest, faintest trace of coquetry out of her voice as she replied, "You seem very sure of that."
"Mustn't I be? Tell me at least. Tell me what you think of me!"
She seemed to catch herself back just in time from uttering follies. "I think you are a dear boy; one of the dearest that I have seen," she said, evenly. "But I know that you're wasting your time with an ageing woman like me."
"A what?" he almost snorted.
She repeated it all the more firmly, perhaps, because she knew that she was looking her youngest in that soft light of the waning moon.
"An ageing woman like me. For I am that. Just think of it, quite sensibly, for a moment. In a little while you would see me getting to be just the same as friends of your mother's, that you're specially nice to and talk to because they are old. Yes! Listen! It's coming. Before you have a line on your face or a grey thread in your hair."
"I shall get as bald as a coot. All flyers will; it's the tight leather caps, here——"