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Angel Cake With Miss Ferguson 25
She smoked her small cigarette silently a moment, and I was silent, too. I didn’t know what she was thinking about, but I was thinking about her beauty and — and at my time of life! — inwardly breathing poetry :
“Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships ?”
Now I knew what she had been thinking about with those pretty puckered lines above her nose and the left lower lip drooped.
“When a girl is sixteen,’’ she said, musically and with careful phrase, “she has illusions and ideals.”
“Still thinking of her Julie !” thought I.
“When she is twenty-nine,” the sweet voice droned, “she still has her ideals, but her illusions are gone.”
“The next step will be forty,” I said to myself, “and I’m glad she thinks of Julie; for I should hate to think of eternal Elsie Ferguson thinking of herself as forty — the realism would be sordid!”
“And when she is forty,” said Miss Elsie, with the low beat in her voice, “both ideals and illusions are gone.”
“What about when she’s ninety ?” I brightly asked.
“When she’s ninety — as I am supposed to be in one scene of ‘The Varying Shore’ — then I remember my mother — her tears held back, her muscles controlled. Oh, oh, I almost forgot the angel cake ! Don't tell me you don’t love angel cake!”
Of course I couldn’t tell her I don’t love angel cake; so we had some with our tea. Mine was such a fat piece that I said it was a bribe; but my levity had no great success. I don’t think lovely Elsie Ferguson likes levity.