no! I'm accustomed to it. Freedom is a phrase. I'm quite as free as
Adelaide. It's usually a great mistake to pity servants."

"And oneself? I suppose you would say it was a great mistake to pity
oneself?"

"I never do it," replied Miss Fleet.

She had charming hands. One of them lay on the little table with a beam
of the sun on it.

"Perhaps you haven't great desires? Perhaps you don't want many
things?"

"I suppose I've been like most women in that respect. But I shall be
fifty almost directly."

"How frightful!" was Charmian's mental comment.

"No, it isn't."

"Isn't what?" said Charmian, startled.

"It isn't at all awful to be fifty, or any other age, if you accept it
quietly as inevitable. But everything one kicks against hurts one, of
course. I expect to pass a very pleasant day on my fiftieth birthday."

Charmian put her chin in her hand.

"How did you know what I thought?"

"A girl of your age would be almost certain to think something of that
kind."

"Yes, I suppose so."

Charmian sighed, and then suddenly felt rather angry, and lifted her
chin.

"But surely I need not be exactly like every other girl of twenty-one!"
she exclaimed, with much more vivacity.

"You aren't. No girl is. But you all think it must be dreadful to be a
moneyless spinster of fifty. I believe, for my part, that there's many a
_vieille fille_ who is not particularly sorry for herself or for the man
who didn't want to marry her."

Miss Fleet was smiling.

"But I'm not a pessimist as regards marriage," she added. "And I think
men are quite as good as women, and quite as bad."

"How calm you are!"

"Why not?"

"I could never be like that."

"Perhaps when you are fifty."

"Not if I'm unmarried!" said Charmian, with a bluntness, a lack of
caution very rare in her.

"I don't think you will be, unless you go on before you are fifty."

Charmian gazed at Miss Fleet, and was conscious that she herself was
entirely concentrated on the present life; she was a good girl, she had
principles, even sometimes desires not free from nobility. She believed
in a religion--the Protestant religion it happened to be. And yet--yes,
certainly--she was absolutely concentrated on the present life. She even
felt as if it were somehow physically impossible for her to be anything
else. To "go on" before she was fifty! What a horror in that idea! To
"go on" at all, ever--how strange, how dreadful! She was silent for some
minutes, with