“But, Bridget, you’re forty-five! Do women—can women—is it possible to—to care at forty-five?”
Bridget chuckled; not a bit offended, but simply amused and superior.
“What’s forty-foive, but the proime of life? Care—are you asking? ’Deed, it’s not forty-five that’s going to see a heart frozen stiff. Ye mind me of the old dame of eighty, who was asked what was the age when a woman stopped caring about a man. ‘’Deed,’ says she, ‘I can’t tell ye that. You’ll have to be asking someone older than me!’”
She laughed again, and I took my turn at looking superior.
“Then, of course, under the circumstances, you will not be inclined to come with me to town?”
“’Deed, and I will then. I’d rather be with you than any man that walks. And besides,” added Bridget shrewdly, “won’t he be all the keener for doing without me a bit?”
I jumped up and marched out of the room, feeling jarred and irritated, and utterly out of sympathy. That’s the worst of being a spinster, you can never count on your companions as a continuance! Kathie left me at the invitation of a man she had known a few months; Charmion regards me as a narcotic to distract her thoughts from another man, and flies off the moment his memory becomes troublesome; and now even Bridget! Men are a nuisance. They upset everything.
I’ve come to the vicarage. When Delphine heard of our departure from “Pastimes” she developed a sudden and violent desire to have me for a visitor for a short time before I left. She is nervy and depressed (“tired out after her hard work!” the dear Vicar translates it), and has got it into her head that my society is the one and only thing that can set her right. It is flattering, and convenient into the bargain, for we are lending “Pastimes” to the widow of a poor clergyman, and it will be a help to her to have me at hand until she has settled down. It seemed a waste of good things to leave the house empty through all the lovely autumn months. This poor soul is delighted to come; we are delighted to have her; the cook and housemaid are—resigned to the change of mistress; more one cannot expect.
I’ve been here a week, and am already endorsing the theory that you can never really know a person until you have lived together beneath the same roof. Before I came, I thought the Vicar as nearly perfect a husband as a man could be, and Delphine about as unsatisfactory a wife. Now, after studying them for one short week, I have modified both opinions. She is a lovable, warm-hearted, well-meaning, weak, vain, dissatisfied child! He is a very fine, a very noble, a very blind, and irritatingly inconsiderate man! On Wednesday he ordered dinner an hour earlier for his own convenience, and he never came home at all. On Friday he said he would be out all day, and walked in at one o’clock, bringing three visitors in his train, demanding a hot lunch. He also, it appears, is difficult about money, which is not in any sense meant to imply that he is mean, but simply that he wishes to give away as much as possible to other people, and to deny his own household in order to be able to do it. I was in the room one day when Delphine presented the monthly bills, and his face was a network of worry and depression. The grocer’s book was not included; he asked for it, and said it had been missing some time. Delphine prevaricated. I knew as well as if I’d been told that she was afraid to show it!
After he had gone out her mood changed. She lifted the little red books from the table, flung them one after the other to the ceiling, caught them with an agile hand, and sent them spinning into the corner of the room. This done, she danced round the table, came to a standstill in front of my chair, and defiantly snapped her fingers.