"So, if I were you," Mrs. Houghton said, still feeling her way, "I wouldn't give him the idea that you are any—well, older than he is. A wife might be fifty years older than her husband, and if her spirit was young, years wouldn't make a bit of difference!"
Eleanor took this somewhat roundabout advice very well. "The only thing in the world I want," she said, simply, "is to make him happy."
They went back to the house in silence. But that night Eleanor paused in putting some last things into her trunk, and, going over to Maurice, kissed his thick hair. "Maurice," she said, "are you happy?"
"You bet I am!"
"You haven't said so once to-day."
"I haven't said I'm alive," he said, grinning. "Oh, Star, won't it be wonderful when we can go away from the whole caboodle of 'em, and just be by ourselves?"
"That's what I want!" she said; "just to be alone with you. I wish we could live on a desert island!..."
Down in the studio, Mr. Houghton, smoking up to the fire limit a cigar grudgingly permitted by his wife ("It's your eighth to-day," she reproached him), Henry Houghton, listening to his Mary's account of the talk in the orchard, told her what he thought of her: "May you be forgiven! Your intentions are doubtless excellent, but your truthfulness leaves something to be desired: 'Years won't make any difference'? Mary! Mary!"
But she defended herself: "I mean, 'years' can't kill love—the highest love—the love that grows out of, and then outgrows, the senses! The body may be just an old glove—shabby, maybe; but if the hand inside the glove is alive, what real difference does the shabbiness make? If Eleanor's mind doesn't get rheumatic, and if she will forget herself!—they'll be all right. But if she thinks of herself—" Mary Houghton sighed; her husband ended her sentence for her:
"She'll upset the whole kettle of fish?"