Part 19 (2/2)

”What?” He threw up his head. ”We must have it out, you know. We are going to.”

”No, no----”

”Yes, I say. Yes. As I was saying----How old should I have to be before you'd want to marry me?”

Mrs. Cartwright gave a little hopeless sort of laugh to herself as she threw upon him that quick glance that seemed to be not looking.

He put on his coat (at her orders), his flyer's coat with the wide collar that made his head seem even smaller and the oval of his face more perfect as it rested against the fur. That young, young face topping the athlete's body that towered above her own, that spring and lilt of his walk had never before made such appeal to the sense of physical beauty that was in her.

Claudia Cartwright thought that in this faculty she brought up the arrears of the countless members of her own s.e.x who would seem to be entirely without it. A woman had once said to her, ”_I don't find any man much under forty-five worth considering. Youth doesn't appeal to me.

I never can see the attraction!_” and to Mrs. Cartwright this was exactly as though her friend had boasted, ”_I am colour-blind! I can't tell one tune from another, either! Also, I never care for flowers._”

The boy at her side was beautiful, in the diffused and s.h.i.+fting light, as a young marble Hermes dressed in the trappings of today and come to life to court her. The next twenty years might teach him many, many things--but they must strip from him one by one the charms of which he was all unconscious, as he demanded of her how old he must be to please her.

She should stop him there, she knew. Since he had not seen that it had been the end, she should put the definite end to it; go in.

She should not dally or coquet with this thing.

Instincts that she had thought long dead were lifting their heads within her; too strong to be beaten down at once. For the life of her the woman could not help dallying with that pa.s.sing moment to which every woman alive cries out within herself, ”Oh _stay_! _Thou art so fair_----”

Aloud she said (truthfully enough, but in a sense that he did not follow), ”I might not want to marry you if you _were_ older.”

”Why not? Why not? The other day in the wood you said it was my age that you barred,” he went on, persistently. ”It isn't that you don't like _me_, is it? _Is_ it? If you just happened to be my own age, then, you'd take me, wouldn't you?”

Would she? Ah, wouldn't she, she thought, vainly. And again for the life of her she could not keep that subtlest, faintest trace of coquetry out of her voice as she replied, ”You seem very sure of that.”

”Mustn't I be? Tell me at least. _Tell_ me what you think of me!”

She seemed to catch herself back just in time from uttering follies. ”I think you are a dear boy; one of the dearest that I have seen,” she said, evenly. ”But I know that you're wasting your time with an ageing woman like me.”

”A what?” he almost snorted.

She repeated it all the more firmly, perhaps, because she knew that she was looking her youngest in that soft light of the waning moon.

”An ageing woman like me. For I am that. Just think of it, quite sensibly, for a moment. In a little while you would see me getting to be just the same as friends of your mother's, that you're specially nice to and talk to because they are old. Yes! Listen! It's coming. Before you have a line on your face or a grey thread in your hair.”

”I shall get as bald as a coot. All flyers will; it's the tight leather caps, here----”

”Nonsense! Ages before that, my hair will be growing grey all over.”

”It's quite grey now; absolutely white in the moonlight--silver! And it looks top-hole,” he a.s.sured her, laughing down at her. ”Why, you look wonderful. You always do. You can't talk about the usual sort of women getting old, and pretend you're going to be like that, because you aren't. How could you ever be? You're different.”

”Only to you,” she sighed, ”and only for the moment.”

”Moment! I swear _I_ shouldn't ever alter----”

”No? Let's turn.” They retraced on the sands the lines of their own footprints; his boot-marks making a contrast with the slim, light prints of the woman's shoes.

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