“If I live to be older than I want to be I shall never forget one awful crack in the roof just above us,” she said. “I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. It seemed to be opening and shutting all the time with a horrible slowness.”
“How old do you want to be?” demanded Sturgess, readily seizing the chance to divert her thoughts from a nightmare memory.
“Forty-five,” she answered without any hesitation.
“Gee! That leaves me less than eighteen years to live!”
“I wasn’t thinking of you, C. K.”
“But your limit rouses one’s curiosity. Why forty-five, any more than fifty or sixty? Granted good health, heaps of people enjoy life at sixty.”
“At forty-five a woman begins to fade and men grow horrid,” she announced calmly, as though stating an incontrovertible thesis.
“Please don’t talk rubbish, either of you,” interrupted Nina sharply. “Alec, can’t we dodge along from rock to rock? It seems to be ever so much more open half a mile ahead.”
“Let’s try,” said Maseden.