"Well now, that's pleasant! Do you call me an old fogy?"
She laughed:
"O, we're not old in years, but we're old in experience. The bloom of the grape is lost."
"But the grape is ripe, and we still have that. The bloom—what is it? A nest for bacteria."
"But it is so beautiful with the bloom on," she said wistfully. "I'd take it again, bacteria and all. See those young people! The meeting of their eyes is great as fame, and the touch—the accidental touch of their hands or shoulders, like a return of lost ships. I am thirty-three years of age and I've missed that somewhere."
Mason lifted his eye-brows:
"Do you mean to say that the touch of Sanborn's hand does not hasten your blood?"
"I do—and yet I love him as much as I shall ever love anybody—now."
Mason studied her, and then chanted softly:
"'Another came in the days that were golden,
One that was fair, in the days of the olden
Time, long ago!'