"It isn't strictly new," she commented, returning in a few moments with the book in her hand. "It was written several years ago. It's nothing out of the ordinary in plot, and the thought which impressed some of us in the 'Scribblers' Club' was concerning the age of Eve when she was created. The heroine of the story is named Eve and is young and fair, so the hero, a gallant soldier, remarks to her one day as they are walking by the river bank at a stolen tryst, that he fancies the first mother was at his sweetheart's identical age when she was created. You see, it is quite a poetic fancy."
"More poetic than true. Soldiers don't talk that way," father said drily. "How old did the book say this Eve was?"
"The author was too wise to tell in plain figures," she answered, "but it was somewhere under the twenties—in the early flush of youth."
"Well, Adam was the first man who ever had the chance of a wife made to order," father kept on. "Surely he had more sense than to take a seventeen-year-old girl."
"No, you're wrong," Rufe disagreed. "I believe that Adam was too much of a gentleman to look a gift wife in the mouth."
"I'll get the Concordance and see if there's any record of her age," mother said, bustling off toward her bedroom and returning in a moment with her well-worn book, but she was unable to find any definite facts about Eve on the morning of that first surgical operation.
"What difference does it make about the actual number of years?" Rufe inquired, with an air of dismissing the subject. "The age of Eve is that picturesque period which comes to a girl after her elbows are rounded out."
My bared arms happened to be resting again on the table during this discussion, and, as Rufe spoke, Cousin Eunice's eyes wandered in their direction. "Then Ann's at it," she concluded triumphantly, and they all stared at me curiously, as if the age of Eve were showing on me like pock-marks!
"Ann doesn't seem nearly so old as she really is," mother began with a kind of uneasy look. "You see, she has never been to school very much, so her education—"
"Now, please don't begin about my education," I begged, for it is a mooted question in my family whether or not I have any, father and I maintaining that I have all that is necessary, mother wishing that it had been more carefully directed along the conventional lines. "If I should go to school until I'm as old as Halley's comet I couldn't learn the things I don't like. And I know all the rest without going! Don't people call me up for miles around to ask who wrote Prometheus Bound and how to spell 'candidacy?'"