part--all! Pretending not to care when we do care. Pretending we do
when we don't. What a shabby little sham most of this thing called life
is! What a shabby little sham!"

She changed her position, recrossed her feet and folded her arms. "If
Mary were here she would say I needed a pill. Perhaps I need two, but
not the pink ones already prepared. Everybody has a pill that's hard to
swallow. /My/ pill might go down easily with some, and over
theirs I might not blink, but--Well, a pill is a pill; facts are facts,
and old age is old age. The thing is to face what is, shake your fist at
it if necessary, but never meet it, if disagreeable, half-way. I never
meet anything half-way. But it's a cruel trick time plays on us, this
making of body and brain a withered, wrinkled thing, whimpering for
warmth and food and sleep, and babbling of the past. It's a cruel
trick!"

Out on the still air the clock in St. John's church steeple struck
twelve strokes with clear deliberation. From the hall below they were
repeated, and from the mantel behind her the hour chimed softly. She
closed her eyes. "Twelve o'clock! Time for ladies of my age to be in
bed. Not going to bed! And my age hasn't yet reached the
babbling-of-the-past stage. It will never reach that, Gibbie. Never!"

Was it a hundred or a thousand years ago that she used to sit on this
same stool at her father's knees and recite Latin verbs to him, and as
reward have him read her tales of breathless adventure and impossible
happenings, all the more delicious because forbidden by her prosaic
mother? She was seven when her mother died, but she barely
remembered her, and had she lived they would hardly have been great
friends. Her mother's pride was in pickles and preserves and brandy