It was impossible (almost) to contemplate the idea that at a given moment the whole machinery must stop.  She was neither without heart nor without religion, but on the contrary a good woman, to whom many gentle thoughts had been given at various portions of her career.  But the occasion seemed to have passed for that as well as other kinds of emotion.  The mere fact of living was enough for her.  The little exertion which it was well she was required to make produced a pleasant weariness.  It was a duty much enforced upon her by all around her, that she should do nothing which would exhaust or fatigue.  “I don’t want you to think,” even the doctor would say; “you have done enough of thinking in your time.”  And this she accepted with great composure of spirit.  She had thought and felt and done much in her day; but now everything of the kind was over.  There was no need for her to fatigue herself; and day followed day, all warm and sheltered and pleasant.  People died, it is true, now and then, out of doors; but they were mostly young people, whose death might have been prevented had proper care been taken,—­who were seized with violent maladies, or caught sudden infections, or were cut down by accident; all which things seemed natural.  Her own contemporaries were very few, and they were like herself—­living on in something of the same way.  At eighty-five all people under seventy are young; and one’s contemporaries are very, very few.

Nevertheless these men did disturb her a little about her will.  She had made more than one will in the former days during her active life; but all those to whom she had bequeathed her possessions were dead.  She had survived them all, and inherited from many of them; which had been a hard thing in its time.  One day the lawyer had been more than ordinarily pressing.  He had told her stories of men who had died intestate, and left trouble and penury behind them to those whom they would have most wished to preserve from all trouble.  It would not have become Mr. Furnival to say brutally to Lady Mary, “This is how you will leave your godchild when you die.”  But he told her story after story, many of them piteous enough.

“People think it is so troublesome a business,” he said, “when it is nothing at all—­the most easy matter in the world.  We are getting so much less particular nowadays about formalities.  So long as the testator’s intentions are made quite apparent—­that is the chief matter, and a very bad thing for us lawyers.”

“I dare say,” said Lady Mary, “it is unpleasant for a man to think of himself as ‘the testator.’  It is a very abstract title, when you come to think of it.”

“Pooh’” said Mr. Furnival, who had no sense of humor.

“But if this great business is so very simple,” she went on, “one could do it, no doubt, for one’s self?”