I assured her that I had no different ambitions than to keep her company, but there flashed across my mind, set off by her uncertainty of me, a sense of power over her that allowed me to make a private reservation. I would stay with her so long as she upheld her part of the bargain and did not deprive me of my freedom in those hours which were not dedicated to her. For it had occurred to me that as she grew older she might become more demanding of my time. Indeed, she had prepared me for that in our conversation the night before my first tea-party when she had said, “I don’t want you to make up your mind yet, for you may find me too exacting. It will not be my fault, for I pride myself on respecting other people’s privacy in their leisure hours, but it will be the fault of senility, that wretched Mr. Hyde I shall become in my last days.” I had then disbelieved her completely, even though a few days later, I heard Hopestill say to someone, “Auntie is so improvident in her choice of fixed ideas. She surely will dodder into crabbed old age if she keeps thinking of it.”

Tonight, like a subterranean river, a senile complaint slipped through her words and it did not, at last, seem unlikely that in a while the undertone would become the minor key in which were played the jeremiads of those whose only future is eternity.

Laughing, when she spoke of the humiliating possibility of a wheel chair, I said, “Miss Pride, you should bone up on those Thibetans who claim they know how to live two centuries or so.” I was recalling a photograph I had seen in a newspaper of a Hindu, said to have been born in 1786, making him a century and a half old. The broad, bald skull had looked like a death’s-head and the drooping eyes had been tenantless, mere vacant openings in round pits of black shadows. The long dark lips were stretched in a hideous grimace, not of scorn for the photographer but of a corrupt delight in the pyrrhic victory of flesh over time. The caption had read, “Says He Will Live Till 2000 or After.”

“I should hope not!” she exclaimed. “Do you think I want to see Boston turned into a hive of Customs Houses and aeroplanes replacing automobiles? No, thank you. I don’t fancy myself rocketing about in the air with Mac at the controls. A century is too long for anyone to live. To go beyond that is my idea of anticipating Judgment Day. Tomorrow afternoon at Mrs. McAllister’s, you will possibly meet a Mr. Childreth who is the oldest living graduate of Harvard College. He was of the class of ’67. Although he still has his own teeth—they’re no beauties, however—he has quite lost his reason and reads books written for children. It always strikes me as ironical that on Commencement Day he marches at the head of the Harvard procession when he barely knows his A.B.C.’s.”