They thought they noticed, too, that old people are more alike than middle-aged people. There is something of the same narrowness and similarity in the range of their tastes and feelings that is marked in children. The reason they thought to be that the interests of age have contracted to about the same scope as those of childhood before it has expanded into maturity. The skein of life is drawn together to a point at the two ends and spread out in the middle. Middle age is the period of most diversity, when individuality is most pronounced. The members of the club observed with astonishment that, however affectionately we may regard old persons, we no more think of becoming like them than of becoming negroes. If we catch ourselves observing their senile peculiarities, it is in a purely disinterested manner, with a complete and genuine lack of any personal concern, as with a state to which we are coming.
They could not help wondering if Henry were not right about people never really growing old, but just changing from one personality to another. They found the strange inability of one epoch to understand or appreciate the others, hard to reconcile with the ordinary notion of a persistent identity.
Before the end of the week, the occupation of their minds with the subject of old age produced a singular effect. They began to regard every event and feeling from a double standpoint, as present and as past, as it appeared to them and as it would appear to an old person.
Wednesday evening came at last, and a little before the hour of eight, five venerable figures, more or less shrouded, might have been seen making their way from different parts of the village toward the Fellows mansion. The families of the members of the club were necessarily in the secret, and watched their exit with considerable laughter from behind blinds. But to the rest of the villagers it has never ceased to be a puzzle who those elderly strangers were who appeared that evening and were never before or since visible. For once the Argus-eyed curiosity of a Yankee village, compared with which French or Austrian police are easy to baffle, was fairly eluded.
Eight o'clock was the hour at which the old folks' party began, and the reader will need a fresh introduction to the company which was assembled at that time in Mary Fellows's parlor. Mary sat by her grandmother, who from time to time regarded her in a half-puzzled manner, as if it required an effort of her reasoning powers to reassure her that the effect she saw was an illusion. The girl's brown hair was gathered back under a lace cap, and all that appeared outside it was thickly powdered. She wore spectacles, and the warm tint of her cheeks had given place to the opaque saffron hue of age. She sat with her hands in her lap, their fresh color and dimpled contour concealed by black lace half-gloves. The fullness of her young bosom was carefully disguised by the arrangement of the severely simple black dress she wore, which was also in other respects studiously adapted to conceal, by its stiff and angular lines, the luxuriant contour of her figure. As she rose and advanced to welcome Henry and Jessie, who were the last to arrive, it was with a striking imitation of the tremulously precipitate step of age.
Jessie, being rather taller than the others, had affected the stoop of age very successfully. She wore a black dress spotted with white, and her whitened hair was arranged with a high comb. She was the only one without spectacles or eyeglasses. Henry looked older and feebler than any of the company. His scant hair hung in thin and long white locks, and his tall, slender figure had gained a still more meagre effect from his dress, while his shoulders were bowed in a marked stoop; his gait was rigid and jerky. He assisted himself with a gold-headed cane, and sat in his chair leaning forward upon it.
George, on the other hand, had followed the hint of his father's figure in his make-up, and appeared as a rubicund old gentleman, large in the waist, bald, with an apoplectic tendency, a wheezy asthmatic voice, and a full white beard.
Nellie wore her hair in a row of white curls on each side of her head, and in every detail of her dress and air affected the coquettish old lady to perfection, for which, of course, she looked none the younger. Her cheeks were rouged to go with that style.
Frank was the ideal of the sprightly little old gentleman. With his brisk air, natty eye-glasses, cane and gloves, and other items of dress in the most correct taste, he was quite the old beau. His white hair was crispy, brushed back, and his snowy mustache had rather a rakish effect.
Although the transformation in each case was complete, yet quite enough of the features, expression, or bearing was apparent through the disguise to make the members of the party entirely recognizable to each other, though less intimate acquaintances would perhaps have been at first rather puzzled. At Henry's suggestion they had been photographed in their costumes, in order to compare the ideal with the actual when they should be really old.