“Why, Charley,” murmured Mrs. Carr reproachfully, while Jane, recovering her nagging manner with an accession of spirit, remonstrated feelingly:  “Charley, you really must be more careful what you say.”

“Oh, fudge!” retorted Charley, with playful rudeness.  “You see she’s at it still, Gabriella,” he pursued, winking audaciously.  “If it isn’t one thing, it’s another, but she wouldn’t be satisfied with perfection.  Well, here we are.  There are the hydrangeas.  I hope you’re pleased.”

“I declare, those waste papers have blown right back again on the grass, and I had them picked up the last thing before I left,” said Jane in a tone of annoyance.

“Never mind the papers; Gabriella isn’t looking for papers,” returned Charley, while he helped Mrs. Carr out of the motor and up the steps.  “So here you are, mother, and the air didn’t kill you.”

“I may have neuralgia to-morrow.  You never can tell,” replied Mrs. Carr.  “I shouldn’t worry about the papers, Jane.  Nobody can help the way they blow about.  I want Gabriella to see the children the first thing.”

As they entered the house Jane’s children, a flock of five girls and two boys, fluttered up to be introduced, and among them Gabriella discovered the composed baby of Jane’s tragic flight.  It seemed an age ago, and she felt not thirty-eight, but a thousand.

After dinner Charley, who had eaten immoderately, unfolded the evening paper under the electric lamp in the library, and dozed torpidly while the girls plied their aunt with innumerable questions about New York and the spring fashions.  “It will be lovely to have Fanny with us at the White Sulphur.  I know her clothes will be wonderful,” they chirped happily, clustering eagerly about the sofa on which Gabriella was sitting.  Jane’s children, deriving from some hardy stock of an earlier generation, were handsome, vigorous, optimistic in blood and fibre, and so uncompromisingly modern that Gabriella wondered how Mrs. Carr, with her spiritual neuralgia and her perpetual mourning, had survived the unceasing currents of fresh air with which they surrounded her.

“Yes, things have changed.  It is the age,” thought Gabriella; and presently, when Cousin Jimmy and Cousin Pussy came in to welcome her, she repeated:  “Yes, it is the age.  There is no escaping it.”

“Why, my dear child, you are looking splendidly,” trilled Cousin Pussy, with her old delightful manner and her flattering vision so different from Florrie’s.  She was still trim, plump, and rosy, though her hair was now snow white and her pretty face was covered with cheerful wrinkles.  “You’re handsomer than you ever were in your life, and the dash of gray on your temples doesn’t make you look, a day older—­not a day.  Some people turn gray so very young.  I remember Cousin Becky Bollingbroke’s hair was almost white by the time she was thirty-five.  It runs like that in some families.  But you look just as girlish as ever.  It’s wonderful, isn’t it, Cousin Fanny, the way the women of this generation stay girls until they are fifty?  I don’t believe you’ll ever look any older, Gabriella, than you do now.  Of course, I suppose your business has something to do with it, but if I met you for the first time, it would never cross my mind that you were a day over twenty-five.”