THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes: the children must have been a terrible difficulty.
Fortunately for me, I had none.

MRS LUTESTRING. There was one daughter who was the child of my very
heart. Some years after my first drowning I learnt that she had lost her
sight. I went to her. She was an old woman of ninety-six, blind. She
asked me to sit and talk with her because my voice was like the voice of
her dead mother.

BURGE-LUBIN. The complications must be frightful. Really I hardly know
whether I do want to live much longer than other people.

MRS LUTESTRING. You can always kill yourself, as cook did; but that
was influenza. Long life is complicated, and even terrible; but it is
glorious all the same. I would no more change places with an ordinary
woman than with a mayfly that lives only an hour.

THE ARCHBISHOP. What set you thinking of it first?

MRS LUTESTRING. Conrad Barnabas's book. Your wife told me it was more
wonderful than Napoleon's Book of Fate and Old Moore's Almanac, which
cook and I used to read. I was very ignorant: it did not seem so
impossible to me as to an educated woman. Yet I forgot all about it, and
married and drudged as a poor man's wife, and brought up children, and
looked twenty years older than I really was, until one day, long after
my husband died and my children were out in the world working for
themselves, I noticed that I looked twenty years younger than I really
was. The truth came to me in a flash.