Claude was an omnivorous reader, and had always a new set of anecdotes and epigrams with which to keep the talk alive, anecdotes so brief and sparkling that he seemed to flash them across the table like pistol shots. French, German, or Italian, his accent was faultless, and his enunciation clear as that of the most finished comedian; while in the give and take of friendly chaff with such an interlocutor as Lady Susan, he was a past master.
Vera did not talk much, but she looked radiant, the lovely embodiment of youth and gladness. Her light laughter rang clear above Susan's, after Claude's most successful stories. Once only during that gay repast was a graver note sounded, and it came from the most frivolous of the party, from Susie Amphlett, who had one particular aversion, which she sometimes enlarged upon with a morbid interest.
Age was Susan's bugbear.
"I think of it when I wake in the night, like Camilla, in 'Great Expectations,'" she said, looking round the table with frightened eyes, as if she were seeing ghosts.
The grapes and peaches had been handed, and it was the confidential quarter of an hour after the servants had gone.
"I don't like to give myself away before a butler," Susie said, as the door closed on the last of the silk stockings. "Footmen are non-existent: one doesn't stop to consider whether they are matter, or only electricity; but a butler is a person and can think—perhaps a socialistic satirist, seething with silent scorn for his mistress and her friends."
"And no doubt an esteemed contributor to one of the Society Papers," said Claude.
"I am not afraid of Democracy, nor the English adaptation of the French Revolution, though I feel sure it is coming," continued Lady Susan, planting her elbow on the table in an expansive mood. "I am afraid of nothing except growing old. That one terror swallows up all trivial fears. They might take my money, they might steep me in poverty to the lips, and if I could keep youth and good looks, I should hardly mind."
Again she looked at the others appealingly, like a child that is afraid of Red Riding-hood's wolf.
"Age is such a hideous disease—the one incurable malady. And we must all have it. We are all growing old; even you, Vera, though you have not begun to think about it. I didn't till I was thirty. As we sit at this table and laugh and amuse ourselves, the sands are falling, falling, falling—they never stop! Glad or sorry, that horrible disease goes on, till the symptoms suddenly become acute—grey hair, wrinkles, gout."