She answered my question by another.
“What age are your women when they are as I am?”
“None of our women were ever quite like you, Lady Yva. Yet, say from twenty-five to thirty years of age.”
“Ah! I have been counting and now I remember. When my father sent me to sleep I was twenty-seven years old. No, I will not deceive you, I was twenty-seven years and three moons.” Then, saying something to the effect that she would return, she departed, laughing a little in a mischievous way, and, although I did not observe this till afterwards, Tommy departed with her.
When I repeated what she had said to Bastin and Bickley, who were standing at a distance straining their ears and somewhat aggrieved, the former remarked:
“If she is twenty-seven her father must have married late in life, though of course it may have been a long while before he had children.”
Then Bickley, who had been suppressing himself all this while, went off like a bomb.
“Do you tell us, Bastin,” he asked, “that you believe one word of all this ghastly rubbish? I mean as to that antique charlatan being a thousand years old and having caused the Flood and the rest?”
“If you ask me, Bickley, I see no particular reason to doubt it at present. A person who can go to sleep in a glass coffin kept warm by a pocketful of radium together with very accurate maps of the constellations at the time he wakes up, can, I imagine, do most things.”
“Even cause the Deluge,” jeered Bickley.