She
was nearsighted, and had always worn spectacles. She took them off and
laid them on her knee. The parson moved involuntarily in his chair. He
remembered how she had used to do that when they were talking
intimately, so that his eager look might not embarrass her. "Nothing
makes much difference when folks get to be as old as you and I are."
"I don't feel old," said the parson resentfully. "I do _not_! And you
don't look so."
"Well, I am. We're past our youth. We've got to the point where the
only way to renew it is to look out for the young ones."
The parson had always had with her a way of reading her thought and
bursting out boyishly into betrayal of his own.
"Mary Ellen," he cried, "I never should have explained it so, but
Isabel looks like you!"
She smiled sadly. "I guess men make themselves think 'most anything
they want to," she answered. "There may be a family look, but I can't
see it. She's tall, too, and I was always a pint o' cider--so father
said."
"She's got the same look in her eyes," pursued the parson hotly. "I've
always thought so, ever since she was a little girl."
"If you begun to notice it then," she responded, with the same gentle
calm, "you'd better by half ha' been thinking of your own wife and her
eyes.
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