They shook hands warmly and still looked each other in the eye. They had not met for years, and neither liked to think what was in the other's mind. But Madam Fulton, after they had sat down, challenged it.
"I'm an old woman, Billy." She wrinkled up her eyes in a delightful way she had. "Don't you think that's funny?"
Billy with difficulty crossed one leg over the other, helping it with a plump hand.
His round, comfortable voice at once put her where she liked to be, in the field of an unconsidered intercourse with man. Electra, she knew, was too much with her, but she had forgotten how invigorating these brisk yet kindly breezes were, from the other planets. "That's what I came over to see about," Billy was saying, with a rakish eye. "I needn't have taken the trouble. You're as little changed as that syringa bush."
Her brilliant face softened into something wistful.
"The bush will come into bloom in a few weeks, Billy," she reminded him. "I shan't ever bloom again."
"Boo to a goose!" said Billy. "You're in bloom now."
The wistfulness was gone. She adjusted her glasses on her nose and eyed him sharply.
"I think too much about old age," she said. "I regard mine as a kind of mildew, and every day and forty times a day I peer at myself to see if the mildew's growing thicker. But you don't seem to have any mildew, Billy. You're just a different kind of person from what you were fifty years ago. You haven't gone bad at all."
Billy set his correct feet together on the floor, rose, and, with his hand on his heart, made her a bow.
"I don't care for it much myself," he said.
"Growing old? It's the devil, Billy. Don't talk about it. Why aren't you in England?"
"Your men run over to arrange with us in London. There was no occasion for my coming here. But I simply wanted to. I got a little curious--homesick, maybe. So I came. Got in last night. I read your book before I sailed."
She looked at him quizzically and almost, it might be said, with a droll uneasiness.
"You brought it out in England," she offered, in rather a small voice. "Naturally you'd read it."
"Not because we brought it out. Because it was yours," he corrected her. "My word, Florrie, what a life you've had of it."
The pink crept into her cheeks. Her eyes menaced him.