They finally agreed on the identity of Jessie, Nellie, and Frank, and of George also, on his assuring them that he was once of slender figure. This left two figures which nobody could recognize, though Jessie insisted that the gentleman was Henry, and Mary thought the other young lady was a Miss Fellows, a girl of the village, who, she explained, had died young many, many years ago.
“Don't you remember her?” she asked them, and her voice trembled with a half-genuine sort of self-pity, as if, for a moment, she imagined herself her own ghost.
“I recall her well,” said Frank; “tall, grave, sweet, I remember she used to realize to me the abstraction of moral beauty when we were studying Paley together.”
“I don't know when I have thought so much of those days as since I received cards for your golden wedding, Judge,” said Nellie to Henry, soon after. “How many of those who were present at your wedding will be present at your golden wedding, do you suppose?”
“Not more than two or three,” replied Henry, “and yet the whole village was at the wedding.”
“Thank God,” he said a moment after, “that our friends scatter before they die. Otherwise old people like us would do nothing but attend funerals during the last half of our lives. Parting is sad, but I prefer to part from my friends while they are yet alive, that I may feel it less when they die. One must manage his feelings or they will get the better of him.”
“It is a singular sensation,” said George, “to outlive one's generation. One has at times a guilty sense of having deserted his comrades. It seems natural enough to outlive any one contemporary, but unnatural to survive them as a mass,—a sort of risky thing, fraught with the various vague embarrassments and undefined perils threatening one who is out of his proper place. And yet one does n't want to die, though convinced he ought to, and that's the cowardly misery of it.”
“Yes,” said Henry, “I had that feeling pretty strongly when I attended the last reunion of our alumni, and found not one survivor within five classes of me. I was isolated. Death had got into my rear and cut me off. I felt ashamed and thoroughly miserable.”
Soon after, tea was served. Frank vindicated his character as an old beau by a tottering alacrity in serving the ladies, while George and Henry, by virtue of their more evident infirmity, sat still and allowed themselves to be served. One or two declined tea as not agreeing with them at that hour.
The loquacious herb gave a fresh impulse to the conversation, and the party fell to talking in a broken, interjectory way of youthful scenes and experiences, each contributing some reminiscence, and the others chiming in and adding scraps, or perhaps confessing their inability to recall the occurrences.