“They’d have been as dull as a sermon at tea-time if it hadn’t been for me,” he resumed. “You see, I kept the ball rolling.” “Naturally!--it’s tennis,” murmured his wife, drowsily. “Don’t be a fool, Margaret! I mean I keep people amused.” “I’m sure you do!” his “Margaret” agreed, as she smothered another yawn. “You’re the most amusing man I know!” “Glad you admit it!” he said, captiously. “Not being amusing yourself, you ought to thank God you’ve got an amusing husband!” This time Mrs. May emitted a bleating giggle. “I do!” “Now if it were not for Diana----” His wife opened her eyes. “What about Diana?” “Well--Diana--put it how you like, but she’s Diana. She’ll never be anything else! Our daughter, oh, yes!--I know all that!--hang sentiment! Everybody calls her an old maid--and she’s in the way.” A light-footed figure pacing up and down the grass walk, unseen between the two rose hedges close by, came to a sudden pause--listening. “She’s in the way,” repeated Mr. May, with somewhat louder emphasis. “Unmarried women of a certain age always are, you know. You can’t class them with young people, and they don’t like being parcelled off with old folks. They’re out of it altogether unless they’ve got something to do which takes them away from their homes and saves them from becoming a social nuisance. They’re superfluous. ‘How is your daughter?’ the women here ask me, with a kind of pitying smile, as though she had the plague, or was recovering from small-pox. To be a spinster over thirty seems to them a kind of illness.” “Well, it’s an illness that cannot be cured with Diana now!” sighed Mrs. May. “Quite hopeless!” “Quite.” And her husband gave his chronic snort of ill-tempered defiance. “It’s a most unfortunate thing--especially for _me_. You see, when I go about with a daughter like Diana, it makes me seem so old!” “And me!” she interposed. “You talk only of yourself,--don’t forget me!” Mr. May laughed--a short, sardonic laugh. “_You!_ My dear Margaret, I don’t wish to be unkind, but really _you_ needn’t worry yourself on that score! Surely you don’t suppose _you’ll_ ever look young again? Think of your size, Margaret!--think of your size!” Somewhat roused from her customary inertia by this remark, Mrs. May pulled herself up in her chair with an assumption of dignity. “You are very coarse, James,” she said--“very coarse indeed! I consider that I look as young as you do any day,--I ought to, for you are fully eight years my senior--I daresay more, for I doubt if you gave your true age when I married you. You want to play the young man, and you only make yourself ridiculous,--I have no wish to play the young woman, but certainly Diana, with her poor, thin face--getting so many wrinkles, too!--does make me seem older than I am. She has aged terribly the last three or four years.” “She’ll never see forty again,” said Mr. May, tersely. Mrs. May rolled up her eyes in pained protest.