“Well, here I am--a girl with her head turned by a glimpse at a most romantic play, by cakes and champagne cup, and then sent home to bread without jam. Since I've known of this it has taken most of the color out of everyday things, they are like a tub-full of limp rags with the dye run from them. I want Peyton, yes, I love him; but what I thought would satisfy me doesn't. I want more! I am very serious about the romantic play--it is exactly what I mean. I had read about great emotions, seen them since I was a child at the opera, and there was the Madrid affair; but that was so far away, and I never thought of the others as real; I never understood that people really had them, in Eastlake as well as Spain, until I watched Peyton miss his. And then it came over me in a flash what life could be.” “We are all in the same fix, Claire,” he told her. “But not you,” she replied impatiently; “your existence with Fanny is the most perfect for miles around. Fanny is marvelous to you, and you are as sensible as you are nice.” “You think, then, that I haven't seen any of this romantic show you are talking about?” “If you had you wouldn't let it spoil your comfort.” The pig again! “Well, what is it here or there?” she cried. “I'll feel like this for a little and then die alive. Did you ever notice an old woman, Lee? She is like a horrid joke. There is something unconquerably vain and foolish about old men that manages to save them from entire ruin. But a woman shrivelled and blasted and twisted out of her purpose--they either look as though they had been steeped in vinegar or filled with tallow--is simply obscene. Before it is too harrowing, and in their best dresses and flowers, they ought to step into a ball-room of chloroform. But this change in me, Lee, isn't in my own imagination. The people who know me best have complained that what patience I had has gone; even Ira, I'm certain, notices it. I have no success in what used to do to get along with; my rattle of talk, my line, is gone.” “Those relations of Mina Raff's, the Groves,” he said, shifting the talk to the subject of his thoughts, “are very engaging. Mrs. Grove specially. She has splendid qualities almost never found together in one person. She is, well, I suppose careful is the word, and, at the same time, not at all dull. I wonder if she is altogether well? Her paleness would spoil most women's looks and, it seems to me, she mentioned her heart.” “Good Lord, Lee, what are you rambling on about? I don't care for a description of the woman like one of those anatomical zodiacs in the Farmers' Almanac.” She turned her horse, without warning, through a break in the fence; and, putting him at a smart run, jumped a stream with a high insecure bank beyond, and went with a pounding rush up a sharp incline. He followed, but more conservatively; and, at the solid fence she next took, he shouted that she'd have to continue on that gait alone.