“I am delighted with him, you know,” she said. “You’ll all like him—such a nice fellow.”
“What sort of age is he?” asked Dolly Kendal, suddenly.
“Twenty-six,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, with precision.
The Kendal twins, on their way home again, dispassionately remarked one to another that they thought Captain Patch would have been older.
“It’s perfectly proper, of course, because of her old father.”
“Good gracious, yes! Besides, what is Nancy Fazackerly? At least as old as Amy.”
“That would make her thirty-three.”
“She looks younger than that, doesn’t she? It’s funny to think of her having been married, and out in India and lost her husband, all inside five years, and come back again to this dead-alive place after all.”
“Oh, well,” said Aileen, with the philosophy due to other people’s troubles, “I daresay she’ll manage to struggle along somehow, like the rest of us.”
The Kendals, who seldom know cheerful anticipations, were more surprised than anybody when their own predictions as to the gain of an additional man to Cross Loman were realized.