Jane turned from the roses to glance at her reflection in the gilt-framed mirror that hung over her Colonial mantelpiece. Jane’s waistline was nothing to be ashamed of. She had no crow’s-feet. When she remembered to hold her head high, her chin, if slightly—well—mature, was certainly not double. It could not be denied, however, that her hair was very grey. Jane hated that. What had Jimmy once said? “A woman is young as long as she looks beguiling with mussy hair.” Jane looked like the Witch of Endor, now, with mussy hair. Still, she reflected courageously, she never allowed it to be mussy. “Well-groomed”—that was the adjective a well-intentioned eulogist would have chosen with which to describe Jane’s hair at fifty. A barren adjective. An adjective devoid of glamour and romance. Well-groomed hair, Jane reflected sadly, would never have appealed to Jimmy.
Did it appeal to Stephen? Jane smiled a little fondly at the thought. Stephen, she knew, had never even observed her increasingly meticulous arrangement of hairnet and hairpin. To Stephen, Jane still looked like Jane, and, though she had ceased to be the phantom of delight that he had married, in Stephen’s eyes Jane could never be fifty. And yet—she was. There were the smiling flowers to prove it.
Jane turned resolutely from the mirror. A woman of character on her fiftieth birthday, she told herself firmly, should not be staring despondently into a gilt-framed looking-glass regretting her vanished charms. A woman of character on her fiftieth birthday should have put vanity behind her. She should be competently and confidently taking stock of the more durable satisfactions of life.
There were plenty of them to take stock of, Jane reflected. Durable satisfactions were the kind she had gone in for. From her earliest girlhood some unerring instinct of emotional thrift had led her to select them at life’s bargain counter. They had worn well. They had washed splendidly. They had not stretched nor shrunk nor faded. They were all nearly as good as new. They were, perhaps, Jane reminded herself, with a smile, a little out of fashion. Durable satisfactions were not in vogue any longer. Cicily professed to think nothing of them. But at fifty Jane could spread them all out before her and take solid Victorian comfort in the fact that there was not a shred of tarnished tinsel among them. No foolish purchases to regret. Only a very fortunate, a very happy woman could say that, Jane reflected wisely.
And yet—and yet—what wanton instinct whispered that a moment of divine extravagance would be rather glamorous to look back upon? That at fifty it would be cheering to remember having purchased—oh, long ago, of course—something superbly silly that you had loved and paid high for and—But no, Jane’s thoughts continued, if you had done that you would also have to remember that you had tired of it or worn it out or broken it in some deplorable revulsion of feeling. It was much better to have gone in for the satisfactions that endured. Satisfactions that endured like the familiar furniture of the Lakewood living-room. Jane’s eyes surveyed the objects around her with a whimsical twinkle—the books, the Steinway, Stephen’s armchair, her own sewing-table, tangible reminders of the solidity of her life. The very walls were eloquent of domesticity. The serenity of the pleasant, ordered room was very reassuring. It reminded her that she had nothing to worry about in her pleasant, ordered life.
The children, of course. You always worried about your children. Even about good children like Cicily, Jenny, and Steve. You worried about Cicily because she smoked too much and drank a little and played bridge for too high stakes and seemed a trifle moody—too reckless one day, too resigned the next. A curious mixture, at twenty-eight, of daring and domesticity. You worried about Jenny because she did not really like the life in Lakewood, because she did not care for dances and was not interested in any particular young man, and talked absurd nonsense about leaving home and taking a job and leading her own life. Jenny was twenty-five. She really should be falling in love with someone. You worried about Steve because—but of course that was only ridiculous! At twenty-three Steve was proving himself a chip off the old block. He was a most enthusiastic young banker. Stephen was delighted with him and Jane was delighted with Stephen’s delight. She would not admit, even to herself, a certain perverse disappointment that her handsome young son, with the world at his feet and so full of a number of things, had embraced the prosaic career of a banker with such ardent abandon. It was nice, it was natural, she told herself firmly, that Steve should follow in his father’s and his grandfather’s footsteps. It was absurd of her to wish him a little more—adventurous. A little less conventional. A bit of a gypsy.
A gypsy. Jane had only known one gypsy. If she had run off with Jimmy and they had had a son—Jane pulled herself up abruptly. These were no thoughts for Mrs. Stephen Carver to be indulging herself in as she stood staring at the great glass bowl of Killarney roses that her three grown children had sent her on her fiftieth birthday. There was nothing in Steve to criticize, of course, save a certain youthful scorn for his Middle-Western environment, engendered by his education on the Atlantic seaboard. Three years at Milton and four at Harvard had transformed Steve into an ardent Bostonian. He had wanted to settle there and go into his grandfather’s bank. His uncle Alden had encouraged the thought. But Stephen had felt that Chicago offered greater
