Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/45

Rh York; when almost my first inquiry on meeting her was about the health of Mrs. Rimmle.

'Oh, she's rather bad—she really is, you know. It's not surprising that at her age she should be infirm.'

'Then what the deuce is her age?'

'I can't tell you to a year—but she's immensely old.'

'That of course I saw,' I replied—'unless you literally mean so old that the records have been lost.'

My sister-in-law thought. 'Well, I believe she wasn't positively young when she married. She lost three or four children before these women were born.'

We surveyed together a little, on this, the 'dark backward.' 'And they were born, I gather, after the famous tour? Well, then, as the famous tour was in a manner to celebrate—wasn't it?—the restoration of the Bourbons—' I considered, I gasped. 'My dear child, what on earth do you make her out?'

My relative, with her Brookbridge habit, transferred her share of the question to the moral plane—turned it forth to wander, by implication at least, in the sandy desert of responsibility. 'Well, you know, we all immensely admire her.'

'You can't admire her more than I do. She's awful.'

My interlocutress looked at me with a certain fear. 'She's really ill.'

'Too ill to get better?'

'Oh, no—we hope not. Because then they'll be able to go.'

'And will they go, if she should?'

'Oh, the moment they should be quite satisfied. I mean really,' she added.

I'm afraid I laughed at her—the Brookbridge 'really' was a thing so by itself. 'But if she shouldn't get better?' I went on.

'Oh, don't speak of it! They want so to go.'

'It's a pity they're so infernally good,' I mused.

'No—don't say that. It's what keeps them up.'