“You are very coarse, James,” she said—“very coarse indeed! I consider that I look as young as you do any day,—I ought to, for you are fully eight years my senior—I daresay more, for I doubt if you gave your true age when I married you. You want to play the young man, and you only make yourself ridiculous,—I have no wish to play the young woman, but certainly Diana, with her poor, thin face—getting so many wrinkles, too!—does make me seem older than I am. She has aged terribly the last three or four years.”
“She’ll never see forty again,” said Mr. May, tersely.
Mrs. May rolled up her eyes in pained protest.
“Why say it?” she expostulated. “You only give yourself and me away! We are her parents!”
“I don’t say it in public,” he replied. “Catch me! But it’s true. Let me see!—why, Diana was born in——”
His wife gave an angry gesture.
“Never mind when she was born!” she said, with a tremble as of tears in her voice. “You needn’t recall it! Our only child!—and she has spoilt her life and mine too!”
A faint whimper escaped her, and she put a filmy handkerchief to her eyes.
Mr. May took no notice. For women’s tears he had a sovereign contempt.
“The fact is,” he said, judicially, “we ought to have trained her to do something useful. Nursing, or doctoring, or dressmaking, or type-writing. She would have had her business to attend to, which would have kept her away from Us,—and I—we—could have gone about free as air. We need never have mentioned that we had a daughter.”