"How nice you look! You are quite well now, and your figure is like a
girl of fifteen."
She turned and looked at me with that love in her face which an old
woman feels for a young man who is something less and something more
to her than her son. As a flush of summer lingers in autumn's face, so
does a sensation of sex float in such an affection. There is something
strangely tender in the yearning of the young man for the decadent
charms of her whom he regards as the mother of his election, and who,
at the same time, suggests to him the girl he would have loved if time
had not robbed him of her youth. There is a waywardness in such an
affection that formal man knows not of.
I remember that day, for it was the last time I saw her beautiful.
Soon after we noticed that she did not quite recover, and we thought
it was because she did not take her medicine regularly. She spent
long hours alone in her greenhouse, the hot sun playing fiercely
on her back, and we supplicated--I was the foremost among her
supplicators--that she would not carry the heavy flower-pots to and
fro, nor cans of water from the tank at the bottom of the garden, and
to save her I undertook to water her flowers for her. But she was one
of those who would do everything herself--who thought that if she did
not shut the door it was not properly shut.
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