Miss Ailie stood quite still now, a stiff, thick figure, with a soft, plain face and nervous hands. "Before you speak," she said, nervously, "I have something to tell you that—perhaps then you will not say it.
"I have always led you to believe," she began, trembling, "that I am forty-nine. I am fifty-one."
He would have spoken, but the look of appeal came back to her face, asking him to make it easier for her by saying nothing. She took a pair of spectacles from her pocket, and he divined what this meant before she spoke. "I have avoided letting you see that I need them," she said. "You—men don't like—" She tried to say it all in a rush, but the words would not come.
"I am beginning to be a little deaf," she went on. "To deceive you about that, I have sometimes answered you without really knowing what you said."
"Anything more, Ailie?"
"My accomplishments—they were never great, but Kitty and I thought my playing of classical pieces—my fingers are not sufficiently pliable now. And I—I forget so many things."
"But, Ailie—"
"Please let me tell you. I was reading a book, a story, last winter, and one of the characters, an old maid, was held up to ridicule in it for many little peculiarities that—that I recognized as my own. They had grown upon me without my knowing that they made me ridiculous, and now I—I have tried, but I cannot alter them."
"Is that all, Ailie?"
"No."