lbow a good deal. This irked her,
though she tried not to show it. She preferred a matinee, or a good
picture or a concert with Sarah, or Vinie, or Julia. They could giggle,
and nudge and comment like girls together, and did. Indeed, they were
girls in all but outward semblance. Among one another they recognized
this. Their sense of enjoyment was un-dulled. They liked a double
chocolate ice cream soda as well as ever; a new gown; an interesting
book. As for people! Why, at sixty the world walked before them, these
elderly women, its mind unclothed, all-revealing. This was painful,
sometimes, but interesting always. It was one of the penalties--and one
of the rewards--of living.

After some such excursion Hannah couldn't very well refuse to take the
children to see a Fairbanks film on a Sunday afternoon when Ed and
Marcia were spending the half-day at the country club. Marcia was very
strict about the children and the films. They were allowed the
saccharine Pickford, and of course Fairbanks's gravity-defying feats,
and Chaplin's gorgeous grotesqueries. You had to read the titles for
Peter. Hannah wasn't as quick at this as were Ed or Marcia, and Peter
was sometimes impatient, though politely so.

And so sixty swung round. At sixty Hannah Winter had a suitor. Inwardly
she resented him. At sixty Clint Darrow, a widower now and reverent in
speech of the departed one whose extravagance he had deplored, came to
live at the hotel in three-room grandeur, overlooking the lake. A ruddy,
corpulent, paunchy little man, and rakish withal. The hotel widows made
much of him. Hannah, holding herself aloof, was often surprised to find
her girlhood flame hovering near now, speaking of loneliness, of trips
abroad, of a string of pearls unused. There was something virgin about
the way Hannah received these advances. Marriage was so far from her
thoughts; this kindly, plump little man so entirely outside her plans.
He told her his troubles, which should have warned her. She gave him
some shrewd advice, which encouraged him. He rather fancied himself as a
Lothario. He was secretly distressed about his rotund waist line and,
theoretically, never ate a bite of lunch. "I never touch a morsel from
breakfast until dinner time." Still you might see him any day at noon at
the Congress, or at the Athletic Club, or at one of the restaurants
known for its savoury food, busy with one of the richer luncheon dishes
and two cups of thick creamy coffee.