ABSTRACT
Growing old! A time we talk of, and jest or moralise over, but find almost impossible to realise – at least to ourselves. In others, we can see its approach clearer: yet even then we are slow to recognise it. ‘What, Miss So-and-so looking old, did you say? Impossible! she is quite a young person: only a year older than I – and that would make her just … Bless me! I am forgetting how time goes on. Yes,’ – with a faint deprecation which truth forbids you to contradict, and politeness to notice, – ‘I suppose we are neither of us so young as we used to be.’
