As we grow older we think more and more of old persons and of old things
and places. As to old persons, it seems as if we never know how much
they have to tell until we are old ourselves and they have been gone
twenty or thirty years. Once in a while we come upon some survivor of
his or her generation that we have overlooked, and feel as if we had
recovered one of the lost books of Livy or fished up the golden
candlestick from the ooze of the Tiber. So it was the other day after my
reminiscences of the old gambrel-roofed house and its visitors. They
found an echo in the recollections of one of the brightest and liveliest
of my suburban friends, whose memory is exact about everything except her
own age, which, there can be no doubt, she makes out a score or two of
years more than it really is. Still she was old enough to touch some
lights--and a shadow or two--into the portraits I had drawn, which made
me wish that she and not I had been the artist who sketched the pictures.
Among the lesser regrets that mingle with graver sorrows for the friends
of an earlier generation we have lost, are our omissions to ask them so
many questions they could have answered easily enough, and would have
been pleased to be asked. There! I say to myself sometimes, in an
absent mood, I must ask her about that.
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