"I must thank you," she said, "for the novelty of an evening walk in the woods. I enjoy it, I confess, very highly. Look at those dark, mysterious vistas, and those deepening shadows blending the bank with its mirror; how different from the trite daylight truth! It took strong hold of my imagination." "Go on. And so you were thinking--" "I was hardly doing so much as thinking. I was seeing it to remember." "Etty draws like an artist," said Flora, in a whisper. "I was taking a mental daguerreotype of my companions, by twilight, and of all the scene round, too, in the same grey tint, just to look at some ten or fifteen years hence, when--" "Let us all three agree," said I, "on the 28th of September, 18--, to remember this evening. I am certain _I_ shall look back to it with pleasure." "O horrid!" shrieked Flora; "how can you talk so! By that time you will be a shocking, middle-aged sort of person! I always wonder how people can be resigned to live, when they have lost youth, and with it all that makes life bearable! Fifteen years! Dismal thought! I shall have outlived every thing I care about in life!" So moaned Little Handsome. "But you may have found new sources of interest," suggested I, perhaps a little too tenderly, for I had some sympathy with her dread of that particular phase of existence, middle-agedness. "Perhaps as the mistress of a household--" "Worse and worse!" screamed Flora. "A miserable comforter you are! As if it were not enough merely to grow old, but one must be a slave and a martyr, never doing any thing one would prefer to do, nor going anywhere that one wants to go,--bound for ever to one spot, and one perpetual companion--" "Planning dinners every day for cooks hardly less ignorant than yourself," added I, laughing at her selfish horror of matronly bondage, yet provoked at it. "Miss Etty, would _you_, if you could, stand still instead of going forward?" "My happiness is altogether different from Flora's," she replied, "though we were brought up side by side. What has taught me to be independent of the world and its notice was my being continually compared with her, and assured, with compassionate regret, that I had none of those qualifications which could give me success in general society." "Which was a libel--" I began. "Without the last syllable," said Flora, catching up the word. "At any rate, I knew I was plain and shy, and made friends slowly. So I chose such pleasures as should be under my own control, and could never fail me. They make my life so much happier and more precious than it was ten years ago, that I feel certain I shall have a wider and fuller enjoyment of the same ten years hence."