I am not writing this out of any compliment to two wonderful "old"
ladies of whom I am particularly thinking. They would consider me a
dunce were they to suspect me of any such commonplace intent. No! I am
not going to call them "eighty years young," or employ any of those
banal euphemisms with which would-be "tactful" but really club-footed
sentimentalists insult the intelligence of the so-called "old." Of
course, I know that they are both eighty or thereabouts, and they know
very well that I know. We make no secret of it. Why should we? Actually
though the number of my years falls short of eighty, I feel so much
older than either of them, that it never occurs to me to think of them
as "old," and often as I contemplate their really glowing energetic
youth, I grow melancholy for myself, and wonder what has become of my
own.

They were schoolgirls together. Luccia married Irene's brother--for they
allow me the privilege of calling them by their Christian names--and
they have been friends all their lives. Sometimes I see them together,
though oftener apart, for Luccia and her white-haired poet husband--no
"older" than herself,--are neighbours of mine in the country, and Irene
lives for the most part in New York--as much in love with its giant
developments as though she did not also cherish memories of that quaint,
almost vanished, New York of her girlhood days; for she is nothing if
not progressive.

But I will tell about Luccia first, and the first thing it is natural to
speak of--so every one else finds too--is her beauty. They say that she
was beautiful when she was young (I am compelled sometimes, under
protest, to use the words "young" and "old" thus chronologically) and,
of course, she must have been. I have, however, seen some of her early