Dora pulled the thick black curls.
“Oh, I wish you had a wig,” she said, “and nobody knew but me. I shouldn’t mind, and everybody would say what beautiful hair you had, and I should know it wasn’t real, and shouldn’t tell. It would be such fun. Then some day you would annoy me, and I should tell everybody it was only a wig. Claude, when I am old and wrinkly and quite, quite ugly, do you suppose you will care the least little bit any more for me? Oh, dear, I felt so extraordinarily gay all the morning, and now I’ve gone sad all in a minute! Oh, do comfort me! There is such a lot of gray-business in life, unless one dies quite young, which it would immensely annoy me to do. I wonder how we shall stand the gray-business, you and I, when we see each other getting older and more wrinkled and stiffer, stiffer not only in limb, and that is bad enough, but stiffer in mind, which is infinitely worse. No, don’t look at me like that, but sit up and be sensible. It has got to be faced.”
Unconsciously, or at the most half consciously, she was sounding him; she knew quite well that there were beautiful things to be said and said truly about what she had called the gray-business of life, and she wondered, longing that it might be so, whether there was within him that divine alchemy which could see how the gray could be changed into gold. Never had she felt his physical charm so potent as now, when he sat up obedient to her orders and leaned forward toward her, with a look, a little puzzled, a little baffled in his eyes. Almost she was tempted to say to him, “Oh, it doesn’t matter, nothing matters beside this exquisite day and you, you, as I know you already,” but some very deep-lying vein of curiosity wholly feminine, and very largely loving, made her not interrupt her own question, but wait, with just a touch of anxiety, for his reply. She and Claude, she felt, would have some day to be far more intimately known by each other than they were now. Of him she knew little but his personal beauty, though she felt sure that, as she had said to May, he was good, and as she had said to him, that he was safe. And of her she guessed that he knew no more; that he loved her she had no doubt, but she felt that she had shown him as yet but little beyond that which all the world saw, her quick and eager attitude toward life, the iridescent moods of her effervescent nature. There was something that sat below these, her real self. She wanted Claude to know that, even as she wanted to know his real self.
This was all vague to her though real, instinctive rather than describable, and flashed but momentarily through her mind as she waited for his reply. But that reply came at once: Claude seemed to find no difficulty about the facing of the gray-business.
“There’s no cause to worry,” he said. “Just look at Dad and the mater! Isn’t he in love with her still? And I expect what you call the gray-business for a woman cannot begin while her husband loves her. I don’t suppose either of them ever gave a look, so to say, at anybody else. Think of the way he proposed her health last night! Not much gray-business about that! Why it was as if she was his best girl still, and that he’d just come a-courting her, instead of their having been married over thirty years. And she is his best girl still, just as you will ever be mine. And as for her, why he’s her man still. How’s that for the gray-business?”
Dora felt one dreadful moment’s inclination to laugh. She had asked for a sign that he could turn the gray into gold, and for reply she got the assurance that she might put her mind at rest with the thought of what Mr. and Mrs. Osborne were to each other! She knew that for that moment she only saw the ludicrous side of it, and that a very real and solid truth was firm below it, but somehow it was not what she wanted. She wanted ... she hardly knew what, but something of the spirit of romance that triumphantly refuses to acquiesce in the literal facts of life, and see all things through the many-coloured blaze of its own light. She wanted the gray-business laughed at, she wanted the assurance that she could never grow old, given with a lover’s superb conviction, to be received with the unquestioning credulity of a child. No doubt it ought to have been very comforting to think that the years would leave with them the very warm and comfortable affection which the father and mother had for each other, and she ought to be glad that Claude felt so sure of that. But, to her mind, there was about as much romance in it as in a suet pudding.
He saw the eagerness die from her face, and the shadow of her disappointment cross it.
“And what is it now, dear?” he asked.
Dora tossed her head back, a trick she had caught from him.
“It isn’t anything now,” she said, “it all concerns years that are centuries away. I think it was foolish of me to ask at all.”