and.... You see, Biddy, I quite suddenly saw
myself growing old, saw all the arid years in front of me, and saw that
it was a very dreadful thing to grow old caring only for the things of
time. It frightened me badly. I don't want to go in bondage to the fear
of age and death. I want to grow old decently, and I am sure one ought
to begin quite early learning how.

"'Clear eyes do dim at last
And cheeks outlive their rose:
Time, heedless of the past,
No loving kindness knows.'

Yes, and 'youth's a stuff will not endure,' and 'golden lads and girls
all must like chimney-sweepers come to dust.' The poets aren't at all
helpful, for youth--poor brave youth--won't listen to their warnings,
and they seem to have no consolation to offer to middle age.

"The odd thing is that up to a week or two ago I greatly liked the life
I led. You said it would kill you in a month. Was it only last May that
you pranced in the drawing-room in Grosvenor Street inveighing against
'the whole beastly show,' as you called it--the freak fashions, the ugly
eccentric dances, the costly pageant balls, the shouldering,
the striving, the worship of money, the gambling, the
self-advertisement--all the abject vulgarity of it? And my set, the
artistic, soulful literary set, you said was the worst of all: you
actually described the high-priestess as looking like a 'decomposing
cod-fish,' and added by way of a final insult that you thought the woman
had a kind heart.

"And I laughed and thought the War had changed you. It didn't change me,
to my shame be it said. I thought I was doing wonders posing about in a
head-dress at Red Cross meetings, and getting up entertainments, and
even my neverceasing anxiety about you simply seemed to make me more
keen about amusing myself.

"Do you remember a story we liked when we were children, _The Gold of
Fairnilee_? Do you remember how Randal, carried away by the fairies,
lived contented until his eyes were touched with the truth-telling
water, and then Fairyland lost its glamour and he longed for the old
earth he had left, and the changes of summer and autumn, and the streams
of Tweed and his friends?

"Is it, do you suppose, because we had a Scots mother that I find, deep
down within me, that I am 'full of seriousness'? It is rather
disconcerting to think oneself a butterfly and find out suddenly that
one is a--what? A bread-and-butter fly, shall we say? Something quite
solid, anyway.

"As I sa