the delectable odour of the bruised
mint upon which Louisa was trampling. "I'm glad; I was afraid to come
back for fear you would have improved the old garden out of existence,
or else into some prim, orderly lawn, which would have been worse. It's
as magnificently untidy as ever, and the fence still wobbles. It CAN'T
be the same fence, but it looks exactly like it. No, nothing is much
changed. Thank you, Louisa."

Louisa had not the faintest idea what Nancy was thanking her for, but
then she had never been able to fathom Nancy, much as she had always
liked her in the old girlhood days that now seemed much further away
to Louisa than they did to Nancy. Louisa was separated from them by the
fulness of wifehood and motherhood, while Nancy looked back only over
the narrow gap that empty years make.

"You haven't changed much yourself, Nancy," she said, looking admiringly
at Nancy's trim figure, in the nurse's uniform she had donned to show
Louisa what it was like, her firm, pink-and-white face and the the
glossy waves of her golden brown hair. "You've held your own wonderfully
well."

"Haven't I?" said Nancy complacently. "Modern methods of massage and
cold cream have kept away the crowsfeet, and fortunately I had the
Rogerson complexion to start with. You wouldn't think I was really
thirty-eight, would you? Thirty-eight! Twenty years ago I thought
anybody who was thirty-eight was a perfect female Methuselah. And now I
feel so horribly, ridiculously young, Louisa. Every morning when I get
up I have to say solemnly to myself three times, 'You're an old maid,
Nancy Rogerson,' to tone myself down to anything like a becoming
attitude for the day."

"I guess you don't mind being an old maid much," said Louisa, shrugging
her shoulders. She would not have been an old maid herself for anything;
yet she inconsistently envied Nancy her freedom, her wide life in the
world, her unlined brow, and care-free lightness of spirit.

"Oh, but I do mind," said Nancy frankly. "I hate being an old maid."

"Why don't you get married, then?" asked Louisa, paying an unconscious
tribute to Nancy's perennial chance by her use of the present tense.

Nancy shook her head.

"No, that wouldn't suit me either. I don't want to be married. Do you
remember that story Anne Shirley used to tell long ago of the pupil who
wanted to be a widow because 'if you were married your husband bossed
you and if you weren't married people called you an old maid?'