“I just thought it would be nice to hear you say so,” she said, smiling. “I mean, it’s pleasant for people of my age to know that people of your age realize that they’re happy.”
“People of your age!” he repeated. “You know you don’t look precisely like an old woman, mother. Not precisely!”
“No,” she said. “And I suppose I feel about as young as you do, inside, but it won’t be many years before I must begin to look old. It does come!” She sighed, still smiling. “It’s seemed to me that, it must have been a happy summer for you—a real ‘summer of roses and wine’—without the wine, perhaps. ‘Gather ye roses while ye may’—or was it primroses? Time does really fly, or perhaps it’s more like the sky—and smoke—”
George was puzzled. “What do you mean: time being like the sky and smoke?”
“I mean the things that we have and that we think are so solid—they’re like smoke, and time is like the sky that the smoke disappears into. You know how a wreath of smoke goes up from a chimney, and seems all thick and black and busy against the sky, as if it were going to do such important things and last forever, and you see it getting thinner and thinner—and then, in such a little while, it isn’t there at all; nothing is left but the sky, and the sky keeps on being just the same forever.”
“It strikes me you’re getting mixed up,” said George cheerfully. “I don’t see much resemblance between time and the sky, or between things and smoke-wreaths; but I do see one reason you like Lucy Morgan so much. She talks that same kind of wistful, moony way sometimes—I don’t mean to say I mind it in either of you, because I rather like to listen to it, and you’ve got a very good voice, mother. It’s nice to listen to, no matter how much smoke and sky, and so on, you talk. So’s Lucy’s for that matter; and I see why you’re congenial. She talks that way to her father, too; and he’s right there with the same kind of guff. Well, it’s all right with me!” He laughed, teasingly, and allowed her to retain his hand, which she had fondly seized. “I’ve got plenty to think about when people drool along!”
She pressed his hand to her cheek, and a tear made a tiny warm streak across one of his knuckles.
“For heaven’s sake!” he said. “What’s the matter? Isn’t everything all right?”
“You’re going away!”
“Well, I’m coming back, don’t you suppose? Is that all that worries you?”