her quietly, and it is true that she was happier in one sense because life at Pentlands seemed to be working itself out; but inwardly, she went her own silent way, grieving in solitude because she dared not add the burden of her grief to that of old John Pentland. Even Sabine, more subtle in such things than Aunt Cassie, came to feel herself quietly shut out from Olivia's confidence.
Sybil, slipping from childhood into womanhood, no longer depended upon her; she even grew withdrawn and secret about Jean, putting her mother off with empty phrases where once she had confided everything. Behind the pleasant, quiet exterior, it seemed to Olivia at times that she had never been so completely, so superbly, alone. She began to see that at Pentlands life came to arrange itself into a series of cubicles, each occupied by a soul shut in from all the others. And she came, for the first time in her life, to spend much time thinking of herself.
With the beginning of autumn she would be forty years old . . . on the verge of middle-age, a woman perhaps with a married daughter. Perhaps at forty-two she would be a grandmother (it seemed likely with such a pair as Sybil and young de Cyon) . . . a grandmother at forty-two with her hair still thick and black, her eyes bright, her face unwrinkled . . . a woman who at forty-two might pass for a woman ten years younger. A grandmother was a grandmother, no matter how youthful she appeared. As a grandmother she could not afford to make herself ridiculous.
She could perhaps persuade Sybil to wait a year or two and so put off the evil day, yet such an idea was even more abhorrent to her. The very panic which sometimes seized her at the thought of turning slowly into an old woman lay also at the root of her refusal to delay Sybil's marriage. What was happening to Sybil had never happened to herself and never could happen now; she was too old, too hard, even too
