“You darling!” cried Mrs. Lenny. “Did the old woman laugh? But I’d laugh just the same if your dear mamma herself was to talk of feeling old. There’s what I call a lovely woman! Lenny never told me half what a dear she was. Old! but don’t you gloom at me, my pretty pet; I was once seventeen myself, though you wouldn’t think it. The birds now on the trees, I daresay they feel old between one Valentine’s day and another. It is not years that does it, as you say. When we come to my time of life the days go on one after another as fast as they can pelt: they’re all flyin’, flyin’, like the echoes in the song. But at your age they’re longer--they pass more slow--and when there’s much to think about did you say? Ah, but that’s true! When I was your age I had a great deal to think about. We were a large family, six girls of us, and not a penny among the lot. We were just ruined with the emancipation in the West Indies, and all that our parents said to us was, ‘Get married! There’s the officers,’ they said, ‘a set of simpletons! What’s the good of them but to marry the poor girls that know how to play their cards.’ Ah! I thought when I was after Lenny that to be married meant to be well off, and have everything that heart could desire. And so we all thought. We weren’t bad girls, don’t you think it; but that was how were brought up. Get married! and you’ll be well off directly. You never had anything like that said to you to make you old with thinking--” “Oh, no, no,” said Alice, horrified. She scarcely knew whether to be offended by the familiarity of the stranger or interested in her talk. It was an experience altogether different from anything Alice knew of life. “No, I should think not,” said the lady of the pink bonnet, nodding that article vigorously. “Just figure to yourself, my dear, what you would feel if you had to leave this beautiful place, and live down in a house in the town, and have _that_ said to you. You would be shocked, wouldn’t you? But it did not shock us. That was how we were brought up. We had to marry by hook or by crook; and we all did marry. Well, there’s Lenny, he has made me a very good husband; but marrying him wasn’t like coming into a fortune, was it now?--though we’ve always been the best of friends. It was lucky in one way that we never had any children; it left us free to look after ourselves. Nowadays we live a great deal among our friends. We don’t interfere with each other, but we’re always glad to come together again. When I’m comfortable anywhere I send him word, and when he’s comfortable he sends me word. You mustn’t think my coming means more than that, and you must tell your dear mamma so. We’ve not come to do her any harm or her pretty family. Your papa is startled to see us, but he won’t mind in the end. I daresay you have often heard him talk of Barbadoes and the Gavestons? We were six handsome girls, though I say it that shouldn’t. You must have heard of us by name.”