Miss Pride rolled her eyes in a way that was at once so omniscient and so repulsive that I had to look away from her. “You’re quite right, my dear child, most of us are credulous geese. To be candid with you, I’d rather have you like this than have you be a real but bumptious intellectual.”

“Like this?” I repeated, feeling that I ought to defend myself.

“I said most of us are credulous geese. But I know what you know. All I ask is that you don’t take your game seriously.”

I saw nothing for it but to confess that I had, indeed, been bluffing at the Countess’ and to my relief she dropped the subject.

“Am I right in assuming that this restlessness of yours—this wanting to go for a walk in the middle of the night—is just that same homesickness we were talking about earlier? And that you’re not growing tired of your life here?”

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.