"Oh, he's not often like this. Isn't it wonderful," she remarked, with recovered cheerfulness, "to think he's nearly ninety?"
"Repulsive. He gave me the horrors the first time I saw him."
"I can't help staring at him. He seems hardly human."
"He's not human. Only the animal survives. To think that we can go on eating and sleeping so long after the heart and the brain have burned themselves out!" He moved away impatiently, saying, half to himself: "How perishable the best things are! How long the lower nature lasts!"
"Twenty-three—ninety"; she did the sum. "Sixty-seven years more, perhaps."
"For you!" He wheeled round and looked at her. "Heaven forbid! Upon my soul, if I thought that you, with all you stand there for—of beauty and gladness—if I thought you'd go on living till you were the feminine counterpart of that old horror, I"—he choked with a half-whimsical fury—"I believe I could kill you with my own hands."
She came closer, smiling.
"It would be just like me to go on till I'm a hundred, if I'm not stopped."
"What prompts you to say such things to me?" he said, sharply, and turned again to the window.