out your children's
diseases. They are well-bred; they drive themselves on a tight rein,
and endure. They are the world's martyrs.

But men, less restrained, will fidget and wander and sigh and yawn, and
change the subject.

To trap and hold the sympathy of a man--how wonderful! Who wanted a pack
of women? What you really wanted was some man whose trade it was to
listen and to give heed. Some man to whom your daughter's pneumonia, of
however long ago, was not irrelevant, but had its own significance, as
having helped to build you up as you were, you, the problem, with your
wonderful, puzzling temperament, so full of complexes, inconsistencies
and needs. Some man who didn't lose interest in you just because you were
grey-haired and sixty-three.

"I'm afraid I've been taking your attention from the game," said Mrs.
Hilary to Barry Briscoe.

Compunction stabbed him. Had he been rude to this elderly lady, who had
been telling him a long tale without a point while he watched the tennis
and made polite, attentive sounds?

"Not a bit, Mrs. Hilary." He sat up, and looked friendlier than ever.
"I've been thrilled." A charming, easy liar Barry was, when he deemed it
necessary. His Quaker parents would have been shocked. But there was
truth in it, after all. For people were so interested in themselves, that
one was, in a sense, interested in the stories they told one, even
stories about illness. Besides, this was the mother of Nan; Nan, who was
so abruptly and inexplicably not here to-day, whose absence was hurting
him, when he stopped to think, like an aching tooth; for he was not sure,
yet feared, what she meant by it.

"Tell me," he said, half to please Nan's mother and half on his own
account, "some stories of Nan when she was small. I should think she was
a fearful child...."

He was interested, thought Mrs. Hilary, in Nan, but not in her. That was
natural, of course. No man would ever again want to hear stories of _her_
childhood. The familiar bitterness rose and beat in her like a wave. Nan
was thirty-four and she was sixty-three. She could talk only of far-off
things, and theories about conduct and life which sounded all right at
first but were exposed after two minutes as not having behind them the
background of any knowledge or any brain. That hadn't mattered when she
was a girl; men would often rather they hadn't. But at sixty-three you
have nothing.... The bitter emptiness of sixty-three turned her sick with
f