"But I shall be a frightfully long gaunt spinster," she said.
Arthur laughed with her, and said:
"Elizabeth, you aren't really a grown-up woman at all. You're a schoolboy."
"I like that 'grown-up,'" she laughed; "it sounds so much less mature than the reality. I'm twenty-eight, did you know? Already airting towards spinsterhood."
Arthur shook his head at her.
"In your father's words, you are an absurd creature. Sing to me, won't you? seeing it's my last night."
"Yes." She went to the piano. "What shall I sing? 'A love-song or a song of good life'?"
"A love-song," said Arthur, and finished the quotation. "'I care not for good life.'"
Elizabeth giggled.
"Our language is incorrigibly noble. You know how it is when you go to the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford? I come away so filled with majestic words that I can hardly resist greeting our homely chemist with 'Ho! apothecary!' But I'm not going to sing of love. 'I'm no' heedin' for't,' as Marget says.... This is a little song out of a fairy tale—a sort of good-bye song: