“And you didn’t know me, Juley, did you, now?”
“Not by sight, Uncle Andrew. You have changed some,” replied Mrs. Legg, smiling and showing all her fine teeth.
“So have you! So have you! And a deal more ’n I have! I left you a tall, slim, fair wench under twenty, and I find you a broad, stout, rosy woman over forty. If that ain’t a change I’d like to know what a change is!” said Dandy triumphantly.
“Why, your change! When you left us to seek your fortune in the gold fields of California you were a stout, broad-shouldered, red-faced and red-headed man of forty. Now you are a thin, pale, silver-haired old gentleman over sixty,” retorted Julia, artfully mingling flattery with truth.
“Yes, that is so; that is so,” meekly assented old Dandy; and then, meditatively, he added: “And I like it to be so. I like to think a good deal of my body wasting away in the sweet, sunshiny air while still I am able to walk about in it; so as when, I leave it there’ll be only skin and bone to lay in the ground—or very little more.”
“Oh, Uncle Dandy, don’t talk that a way! You can’t be much over sixty, and you may live to be over eighty or ninety—that is twenty or thirty years for you to live in this world.”
“What for?”
“‘What for?’ Why—why, to be a comfort to your dear niece who loves you,” replied Mrs. Legg, not consciously hypocritical, but self-deceived into the notion that she was sincere.
“Ah!” grunted Dandy in a tone which left his niece in doubt whether he disbelieved her or not.
Suddenly the old man, feeling himself fatigued by standing a few minutes, remembered that he had impolitely, even if unintentionally, kept his relatives in the same position.