“You aren’t,” said Sully, giving a squeeze to my arm that she held in the angle of hers, pushing me with her young strength up the hill.  “You’re not as old, cousin Mary.  I’m twenty-two, and you’re only eighteen, and I believe you will never be any older.”

I think perhaps I like flattery.  I am a foolish old woman, and I have noticed that it is not the young girls who treat me with great deference and rise as soon as I come who seem to me the most charming, but the ones who, with proper manners, of course, yet have a touch of comradeship, as if they recognized in me something more than a fossil exhibit.  I like to have them go on talking about their beaux and their work and play, and let me talk about it, too.  Sally Meade makes me feel always that there is in me an undying young girl who has outlived all of my years and is her friend and equal.

“I’m sorry if I was forward, cousin Mary, but the sailing is to be my party, you know, and then I thought you liked him.  He had a pretty manner for a common sailor, didn’t he?  And his voice—­these low-class English people have wonderfully well-bred, soft voices.  I suppose it’s particularly so here in the South.  Cousin Mary, did you see the look he gave you with those delicious dark eyes?  It’s always the way—­gentleman or hod-carrier—­no one has a chance with men when you are about.”

It is pleasant to me, old woman as I am, to be told that people like me—­more pleasant, I think, every year.  I never take it for truth, of course, but I believe it means good feeling, and it makes an atmosphere easy to breathe.  I purred like a contented cat under Sally’s talking, yet, to save my dignity, kept up a protest.

“Sally, my dear!  Delicious dark eyes!  I’m ashamed of you—­a common sailor!”

“I didn’t smile at him,” said Sally, reflectively.

So, struggling up the steep street of Clovelly, we went home to the “New Inn,” to cold broiled lobster, to strawberries and clotted Devonshire cream, and dreamless sleep in the white beds of the quiet rooms whose windows looked toward the woods and cliffs of Hobby Drive on one side, and on the other toward the dark, sparkling jewel of the moon-lighted ocean, and the shadowy line of Lundy Island far in the distance.

That I, an inland woman, an old maid of sixty, should tell a story of sailing and of love seems a little ridiculous.  My nephews at college beguile me to talk about boats, and then laugh to hear me, for I think I get the names of things twisted.  And as for what I know of the other—­the only love-making to which I ever listened was ended forty years ago by one of the northern balls that fell in fiery rain on Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg.  Yet, if I but tell the tale as it came to me, others may feel as I did the thrill of the rushing of the keel through dashing salt water, the swing of the great white sail above, the flapping of the fresh wind in the slack of it, the exhilaration of moving with power like the angels, with the great forces of nature for muscles, the joy of it all expanding, pulsing through you, till it seems as if the sky might crack if once you let your delight go free.  And some may catch, too, that other thrill, of the hidden feeling that glorified those days.  Few lives are so poor that the like of it has not brightened them, and no one quite forgets.