"That's no answer," she said.
There was a pause.
"I was beginning to care too much about you," I said. "I think I was beginning to fall in love with you. I've got out of one false position. Why should I blunder into another?"
"Would it be a false position to love me?" she said.
"Of course that would a good deal depend on you," I said.
"Suppose I wanted you to," she said.
"Oh, but you couldn't!" I said.
"Why couldn't I?" she said.
"But forty," I objected; "nobody loves anybody who's forty, you know."
"I do," she said, "though, come to think of it, you were thirty- nine—when—when it first happened, Hugo."