wonder how soon they begin to feel old?"

"Oh, not till along in the forties, I should say. It's a good deal
in temperament. I don't suppose that either of them realises yet
that they're old, and they must be nearly fifty."

"How strange it must be," said the girl, "fifty years old! Twenty
seems old enough, goodness knows."

"How should you like to be a dotard of twenty-seven?" Kendricks
asked, and she laughed at his joke.

"I don't suppose I should mind it so much if I were a man."

I had promised myself that if the talk became at all confidential I
would drop behind out of earshot; but though it was curiously
intimate for me to be put apart in the minds of these young people
on account of my years as not of the same race or fate as
themselves, there was nothing in what they said that I might not
innocently overhear, as far as they were concerned, and I listened
on.

But they had apparently given me quite enough attention. After some
mutual laughter at what she said last, they were silent a moment,
and then he said soberly, "There's something fine in this isolation
the dark gives you, isn't there? You're as remote in it from our
own time and place as if you were wandering in interplanetary
space."

"I suppose we ARE doing that all the time--on the earth," she