Then we talked about our own old age—­planned it in detail.  Carl declared:  “I want you to promise me faithfully you will make me stop teaching when I am sixty.  I have seen too much of the tragedy of men hanging on and on and students and education being sacrificed because the teacher has lost his fire—­has fallen behind in the parade.  I feel now as if I’d never grow old—­that doesn’t mean that I won’t.  So, no matter how strong I may be going at sixty, make me stop—­promise.”

Then we discussed our plans:  by that time the children would be looking out for themselves,—­very much so,—­and we could plan as we pleased.  It was to be England—­some suburb outside of London, where we could get into big things, and yet where we could be peaceful and by ourselves, and read and write, and have the young economists who were traveling about, out to spend week-ends with us; and then we could keep our grandchildren while their parents were traveling in Europe!  About a month from that day, he was dead.

* * * * *

There is a path I must take daily to my work at college, which passes through the University Botanical Garden.  Every day I must brace myself for it, for there, growing along the path, is a clump of old-fashioned morning glories.  Always, from the time we first came back to teach in Berkeley and passed along that same path to the University, we planned to have morning glories like those—­the odor came to meet you yards away—­growing along the path to the little home we would at last settle down in when we were old.  We used always to remark pictures in the newspapers, of So-and-so on their “golden anniversary,” and would plan about our own “golden wedding-day”—­old age together always seemed so good to think about.  There was a time when we used to plan to live in a lighthouse, way out on some point, when we got old.  It made a strong appeal, it really did.  We planned many ways of growing old—­not that we talked of it often, perhaps twice a year, but always, always it was, of course, together.  Strange, that neither of us ever dreamed one would grow old without the other.

And yet, too, there is the other side.  I found a letter written during our first summer back in Berkeley, just after we had said good-bye at the station when Carl left for Chicago.  Among other things he wrote:  “It just makes me feel bad to see other folks living put-in lives, when we two (four) have loved through Harvard and Europe and it has only commenced, and no one is loving so hard or living so happily. . . .  I am most willing to die now (if you die with me), for we have lived one complete life of joy already.”  And then he added—­if only the adding of it could have made it come true:  “But we have fifty years yet of love.”