"I was wondering whether
it was possible that you could be forty-one."
"You brute," she exclaimed, with uplifted eyebrows. "How dare you?
Forty if you like--for as long as you like. Forty is the fashionable
age, but one year over that is fatal. Don't you know that now-a-days a
woman goes straight from forty to sixty? It is such a delicious long
rest. And besides, it gives a woman an object in life which she has
probably been groping about for all her days. One is never bored after
forty."
"And the object?"
"To keep young, of course. There's scope for any amount of ingenuity.
Since that dear man in Paris has hit upon the real secret of enamelling,
we are thinking of extending the limit to sixty-five. Lily Cestigan is
seventy-one, you know, and she told me only last week that Mat
Harlowe--you know Harlowe, he's rather a nice boy, in the Guards had
asked her to run away with him. She's known him three months, and he's
seen her at least three times by daylight. She's delighted about it."
"And is she going?" Arranmore asked.
"Well, I'm not sure that she'd care to risk that," Lady Caroom answered,
thoughtfully.
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