I did not afflict myself very much, nor pretend to do so. They knew the way home, and after I had blundered about in search of them through the lampshot darkness, I settled myself to walk back at my leisure, comfortably sure that I should find them on the verandah waiting for me when I reached the hotel. It was quite a thick night, and I almost ran into a couple at a corner of our quieter street when I had got to it out of Broadway. They seemed to be standing and looking about, and when the man said, "He must have thought we took the first turn," and the woman, "Yes, that must have been the way," I recognised my estrays.
I thought I would not discover myself to them, but follow on, and surprise them by arriving at our steps at the same moment they did, and I prepared myself to hurry after them. But they seemed in no hurry, and I had even some difficulty in accommodating my pace to the slowness of theirs.
"Won't you take my arm, Miss Gage?" he asked as they moved on.
"It's so VERY dark," she answered, and I knew she had taken it. "Ican hardly see a step, and poor Mr. March with his glasses--I don't know what he'll do.""Oh, he only uses them to read with; he can see as well as we can in the dark.""He's very young in his feelings," said the girl; "he puts me in mind of my own father.""He's very young in his thoughts," said Kendricks; "and that's much more to the purpose for a magazine editor. There are very few men of his age who keep in touch with the times as he does.""Still, Mrs. March seems a good deal younger, don't you think? Iwonder 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 Iwould 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 suggested.
"Yes; but how hard it is to realise that we are on the earth now.
