"How can you bear to be in the house with that awful old man?" Ethan was saying. "Oh, he's not often like this. Isn't it wonderful," she remarked, with recovered cheerfulness, "to think he's nearly ninety?" "Repulsive. He gave me the horrors the first time I saw him." "I can't help staring at him. He seems hardly human." "He's not human. Only the animal survives. To think that we can go on eating and sleeping so long after the heart and the brain have burned themselves out!" He moved away impatiently, saying, half to himself: "How perishable the best things are! How long the lower nature lasts!" "Twenty-three--ninety"; she did the sum. "Sixty-seven years more, perhaps." "For you!" He wheeled round and looked at her. "Heaven forbid! Upon my soul, if I thought that _you_, with all you stand there for--of beauty and gladness--if I thought you'd go on living till you were the feminine counterpart of that old horror, I"--he choked with a half-whimsical fury--"I believe I could kill you with my own hands." She came closer, smiling. "It would be just like me to go on till I'm a hundred, if I'm not stopped." "What prompts you to say such things to me?" he said, sharply, and turned again to the window. "But all the old don't end like Mr. Ball. _I_ shall be a lively old lady, if I'm not stopped." "Oh, nothing could stop you." She laughed. "Don't be so hopeless. You see, I've studied the subject of old age. The reason it isn't more valued is because it's taken too modestly. I suppose it's difficult not to be modest if you're ninety. But no old person should be unselfish or patient. That's fatal. You see the success our own grandmother has made." Without turning round, Ethan began to laugh, too. "A woman must be gentle and amiable (if she can manage it) while she's young. It's becoming in the young," she said, piously; then, with a cheerful gleam, "but all old women should be defiant--yes, they should study a dictatorial style, and make the young ones toe the mark. It's the only way. Oh, I'll be an aged Tartar, and, you'll see, they'll all say, 'A person of remarkable character is old Mrs.--' H'm!" She stopped short, and he turned round smiling and glowering at her, and then back again to the window. "Oh!" she exclaimed, looking over his shoulder. "What? That poor devil over there? Yes, I've been watching him." "I don't see-- Oh, yes, the cripple. Ethan, Ethan, what _is_ one to do with you!" She dropped on the sofa with a face of comic despair. "Do with me?" "Yes--if every time you look out of the window you see a 'devil' of some sort." He laughed, and then: "But you said 'Oh!' and I thought--" "I said 'Oh!' because the rain's stopped and the sun's trying to shine. And all you can see is a cripple dragging his leg through the mud! Come along"--she jumped up--"the rain's ruined the roads, but it hasn't hurt the river, and we'll go for a row. It's going to be beautiful." She dragged him off without ceremony.