Years of Grace

her brown hair, looking critically at her reflection in the glass as she did so. For more than a year, now, Jane had been endeavouring to think of herself as “middle-aged.” On the momentous occasion of her thirty-fifth birthday she had said firmly to Stephen, “Middle-age is from thirty-five to fifty.” But curiously enough, in spite of that stoical statement, Jane had continued, incorrigibly, to think of herself as “young.” In this soft light, thought Jane dispassionately, in her new pink dressing-gown, she really did not look old. And she was prettier at thirty-six than she had been at twenty. No, not that, exactly. The freshness was gone. But prettier for thirty-six than she had been for twenty. At twenty everyone was pretty, and most girls had been, after all, much prettier than she. But at thirty-six⁠—Jane smiled engagingly at her reflection⁠—she held her own with her contemporaries.

At thirty-six the trick was not so much to look pretty as to look young. Beauty helped, of course, but not as much as youth. And she was still slim and agile and not grey and⁠—but what difference did it make, anyway? It didn’t make any difference at all, thought Jane solemnly, unless, like Flora, you were still unmarried, or, like Muriel, though married, you went on collecting infatuated young men.

What use had Jane, in the Colonial cottage in the Chicago suburb, for youth or beauty or any other intriguing quality? Looking young didn’t help you to preside over the third-grade mothers’ meeting in the Lakewood Progressive School. Looking beautiful didn’t help you to keep your cook through a suburban winter. There was Stephen, of course. But wasn’t it Stephen’s most endearing quality⁠—or was it his most irritating?⁠—that for ten years or more Stephen had never really thought about how she looked at all? To Stephen Jane looked like Jane. That was enough for him.

The attitude was endearing, of course, when you looked a fright. When you were having a baby, or trying to get thin after nursing one, or hadn’t been able to afford a new evening gown, or suddenly realized that you looked a freak in the one you had afforded. In crises of that nature it was always very comforting to reflect that Stephen would never notice. But in other crises⁠—when the baby was a year old and you weighed a hundred and thirty pounds again and you had bought a snappy little hat that⁠—or even when you were sitting in front of your dressing-table in a soft light and a new pink dressing-gown, waiting for Stephen to stop gossiping with his mother and come up to join you⁠—it was irritating to reflect that, no matter what you did, to Stephen you would always look exactly as you always had. That you would look like Jane.

Jane put down her hairbrush with a sigh of resignation and selected a new pink hair-ribbon from her dressing-table drawer. She tied it carefully in a bow above her pompadour and, picking up a hand glass, turned to admire the effect in the mirror. She wished her hair were curly. Suddenly the frivolity of that immemorial wish and the sight of the flat satin hair-ribbon and the long strands of straight hair made Jane think of André. Of André and of being fourteen. Of Flora’s red-gold tresses and Muriel’s seven dark finger curls. Of André’s resolute young face and the shy, unspoken admiration in his eloquent young eyes. Funny that just the sight of a hair-ribbon should make her feel his presence so vividly. Should so recall that funny little warm, happy feeling, deep down inside, that was so integral a part of being fourteen and loving André and never feeling quite sure of how he felt about her in return.

André. André was a bridegroom now. Four months a bridegroom. Jane wished she had written to him, as she almost had, that day last spring when she had found his picture in the May copy of Town and Country in Muriel’s living-room. But it had seemed absurd to break a silence of fifteen years’ duration just because she had seen a snapshot, from the camera of the Associated Press, of André, with averted head and raised silk hat, resplendent in bridal finery, hastening through the classic portico of the Madeleine with a vision in floating tulle on his arm. A vision reported to be, in the legend beneath the snapshot. Mademoiselle Cyprienne Pyramel-Gramont, daughter of the Comte et Comtesse Jean Pyramel-Gramont. “Noted Sculptor Weds” had been the caption.

André was a noted sculptor. One of France’s most distinguished sons. Eight years ago, on the occasion of her memorable trip abroad with Stephen, Jane had come suddenly on his Adam in the corridors of the Tate Gallery. Stephen had called her attention to it. He had noticed it because it was double-starred in Baedeker. “This can’t be your Duroy,” he had said.

Later his Eve had met Jane’s eye with an enigmatic smile over her yet untasted apple, in the entrance of the Luxembourg. An Eve still innocent, but subtly provocative. Jane had regarded her with wistful interest. What had André said in the postscript of his long explanatory letter⁠—Jane had never forgotten⁠—“There is something of you in all my nymphs and Eves and saints and Madonnas?” And what was Stephen saying at the moment? “Golly, she smiles like you, Jane! He never got over you!”

“Well, why should he?” she had retorted lightly. But her mind was still busy with the postscript. “Something you brought into my life. Romance, I guess. Nothing more tangible.”

She had brought romance into André’s life, as they walked up the Lake Shore Drive together, with their schoolbooks under their arms. He was achieving its fulfilment, now with this French Cyprienne, in exotic settings that Jane could not even imagine. André was thirty-eight. Yet André was a bridegroom, while she, Jane, was a settled suburban housewife and the middle-aged mother of a fourteen-year-old daughter and an eleven-year-old daughter and a nine-year-old