“What about Diana?”
“Well—Diana—put it how you like, but she’s Diana. She’ll never be anything else! Our daughter, oh, yes!—I know all that!—hang sentiment! Everybody calls her an old maid—and she’s in the way.”
A light-footed figure pacing up and down the grass walk, unseen between the two rose hedges close by, came to a sudden pause—listening.
“She’s in the way,” repeated Mr. May, with somewhat louder emphasis. “Unmarried women of a certain age always are, you know. You can’t class them with young people, and they don’t like being parcelled off with old folks. They’re out of it altogether unless they’ve got something to do which takes them away from their homes and saves them from becoming a social nuisance. They’re superfluous. ‘How is your daughter?’ the women here ask me, with a kind of pitying smile, as though she had the plague, or was recovering from small-pox. To be a spinster over thirty seems to them a kind of illness.”
“Well, it’s an illness that cannot be cured with Diana now!” sighed Mrs. May. “Quite hopeless!”
“Quite.” And her husband gave his chronic snort of ill-tempered defiance. “It’s a most unfortunate thing—especially for me. You see, when I go about with a daughter like Diana, it makes me seem so old!”
“And me!” she interposed. “You talk only of yourself,—don’t forget me!”
Mr. May laughed—a short, sardonic laugh.
“You! My dear Margaret, I don’t wish to be unkind, but really you needn’t worry yourself on that score! Surely you don’t suppose you’ll ever look young again? Think of your size, Margaret!—think of your size!”
Somewhat roused from her customary inertia by this remark, Mrs. May pulled herself up in her chair with an assumption of dignity.