“This is not a curate.”
“Then it must be a woman who has never written an improper novel.”
“It is.”
“And you mean to tell me seriously that there is such a person? To see her would be to take what Punch calls a pre-historic peep. She must be ingeniously old.”
“She is sixty-four, and she is my aunt.”
“How beautiful of her. I am an only child, so I can never be an uncle. It is one of my lasting regrets, although I daresay that profession is terribly overcrowded like the others. But why is she sixty-four? It seems a risky thing for a woman to be?”
“She takes the risk without thinking at all about it.”
“She must be very daring.”
“No; she's only completely natural.”