Page:Middle Aged Love Stories (IA middleagedlove00bacorich).djvu/273

 let’s see; ’eighty, ’ninety—why, she must be between forty-five and fifty now.”

Varian had waved his hand dramatically. “Nobody considers Mrs. Dud and time in the same breath. If you could see her in her golf rig! Or on a horse! She even sheds a lustre on the rest of us. I forget my rheumatism!”

But Hunter, retreating behind his determination to avoid a second seasickness—it might have been sincere; nobody ever knew—had stayed in Florence, and Varian had been obliged to come without him to the house-party.

On a straw cushion, a cup in her strong white hand, a bunch of adoring young girls at her feet, sat Mrs. Dud. Rosy and firm-cheeked, crisp in stiff white duck, deliriously contrasted with her fluffy Parisian parasol, she scorned the softening ruffles of her presumable contemporaries; her delicately squared chin, for the most part held high, showed a straight white collar under a throat only a little