"My dear," she broke out, "_don't_ be so absurdly solemn! Try to enjoy yourself; you'll never be younger than you are now! And I do wish you wouldn't go about in those sad art-colours always. You look like a sparrow having a dust-bath. They may be all right for pictures, but it isn't as if you sat in a frame all day. Good gracious, anybody'd think you were eighty to see you sometimes! Laugh and the world laughs with you, my dear. Come inside, and don't be silly; we're going to have great fun." But again Amory turned away. More than once she had had a wild wonder whether that trip to Paris had not had something to do with her aunt's preposterous rejuvenescence; but no, it was hardly possible that while she herself had wandered in the museums Aunt Jerry had given herself to secret and wicked pleasures. No, it was the boarding-house and the young musical society again. That clever advertisement had really made Aunt Jerry think that she was young.... It did not occur to Amory that perhaps these ancient ones, of forty or fifty or more, had earned a rest. It did not occur to her that life might have bruised and scarred them, and that they laughed a little loudly and stridently for fear of worse, and that there was hardly one of them whose eyes had not rested on sadder and more sordid and tragic scenes than her own had ever seen. She saw them, as it were, in the flat, as a mere human pattern, and when she was bored with it, Glenerne was a thing to be shut up like one of its own photograph albums. Their manners offended her, and she inquired no further.... In the meantime, however, flirtatious little Mrs. Deschamps would sit in a corner with anybody, and her aunt entered into an engagement at an age when she really might have been expected to be thinking of serious things, and the whatnot in the corner, with its photographs of Glenerne's grandchildren, was a source of mirth that seemed never to run dry, and if Amory must be misunderstood, well, it was better to be misunderstood than to be understood by these terrible people. Amory went to her room and took down a volume of Pater. But she had hardly opened the book when there came a tap at her door, and, in response to her "Come in," her aunt's middle-aged fiancé entered.