"Doubted. Would you want to be?"
"I don't really know that I would. Anyway I'm what I had to be. We all are."
"Fatalism is a convenient excuse."
"No; but I am," she insisted. "It's temperament. Temperament is fate. For a woman, anyway," she added with a flash of insight. "You don't blame me, do you? I couldn't help it, could I?"
He smiled down at her, tolerant but uncompromising.
"Oh, don't stand there looking like God," she fretted. "Do you know what I'd resolved to do? Will you laugh at me if I tell you?"
"Probably. Therefore tell me."
"I was going to be a pattern of all the proprieties after I turned forty."
"Too early," he pronounced judicially.
"Why? What do you mean?"