She was counting these years and these friends as she brushed out her long, light hair and looked into the reflection of the fair, bright, thoughtful face that had come to another birthday.
Nothing would ever happen to her again, she was sure; nothing ever did happen after one were as old as twenty-five. In novels, all the wonderful events occurred in earlier life, and then—a blank or bliss or misery, any thing that the reader might guess.
Would her life henceforth be a blank because she was so old and was growing older?
In one of her stories, Miss Mulock had stated that the experience of love had been given to her heroine “later than to most” and she was twenty-four!
“Not that that experience is all one’s life,” she mused; “but it is just as much to me as it is to any man or woman that ever lived; as much as to Cornelia, the matron with her jewels, or Vittoria Colonna, or Mrs. Browning, or Hypatia,—if she ever loved any body,—or Miss Jewett,—if she ever did,—or Sue Greyson, or Queen Victoria, or Ralph Towne’s mother! I wonder if his father were like him, so handsome and gentle. I have a right to the pain and the blessedness of loving; perhaps I have been in love—perhaps I am now! He shut the door that he had opened and he has gone out; I would not recall him if I could do it with one breath—
“‘No harm from him can come to me
On ocean or on shore.’
“Well,” smiling into the sympathetic eyes, “if nothing new ever happen to me, I’ll find out all the blessedness of the old.”
For she must always find something to be glad of before she could be sorrowful about any thing.
She ran down-stairs in her airiest mood to be congratulated by her father in a humorous speech that ended with an unfinished sentence and a quick turning of the head, to be squeezed and hugged and kissed by Dinah, and dubbed Miss Twenty-Five, and then to have her mood changed, all in the past made dreary, and all in the future desolate, by one of her mother’s harangues.
Mr. Wadsworth had kissed his three girls and hurried off to his business, as he had done in all the years that Tessa could remember; Dinah had pushed her plate away and was leaning forward with her elbows on the table-cloth, her face alight with the mischief of teasing Tessa about being “stricken in years.” Tessa’s repartees were sending Dinah off into her little shouts of laughter when their mother’s voice broke in: