"Well, I dare say you'll look twenty-seven when you are fifty. There's something awfully nice about that sort of prettiness. It leaves things delightfully vague. I can't see you fifty."
"Perhaps I never shall be."
"Perhaps not. That's just it. You leave it open to me to think so. I don't seriously contemplate your ever being forty. In fact your being thirty is one of those melancholy and disastrous events that need not actually occur. It's very tactful of you, Kitty."
"All the same, I'm not as pretty as Dora Nicholson."
"Dora Nicholson!"
"You can't say she isn't awfully pretty."
"I don't say it." His voice rose to an excited falsetto. "She is awfully pretty—extravagantly, preposterously pretty. And she'll have to pay for it."
"Oh—we all have to pay for it."
"Sooner or later."
"Poor Dora——"