him jerking with surprise and then he was laughing at her.

`The
awful things you manage
to come up with! All of twenty-seven, aren't you?'
She sipped tea, eyes down. `Twenty-eight, but don't start counting,
will you? So hateful to be
reminded. ...' Twenty-eight. Perhaps, if she was lucky, she had seven
years left of her present career.
Then the lines, those inevitable signs of ageing, would come. Oh,
she had money enough, but the
boredom! And, she admitted