“Why fifteen?”
She smiled, and prodded with her stick at a bit of moss in a crack in the wall. Somewhere below them there was a view, but it was far away.
“Well, because if you were forty you would be just my age.”
“You are thirty.”
“Voilà! That’s exactly what I said. A woman of thirty is as old as a man of forty. As it is, you are a child, and I a middle-aged person.”
Cleeve watched her for a moment. Then he said, slowly: “I’d give up those intervening years to be forty today.”
“Then you’d be an awful idiot!”
“I’d not be an idiot at all. You treat me like a child.”
“You are one—to me.”
“I’m not a child.”