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Nancy Rogerson sat down on Louisa Shaw’s front doorstep and looked about her, drawing a long breath of delight that seemed tinged with pain. Everything was very much the same; the square garden was as charming bodge-podge of fruit and flowers, and goose-berry bushes and tiger lilies, a gnarled old apple tree sticking up here and there, and a thick cherry copse at the foot. Behind was a row of pointed firs, coming out darkly against the swimming pink sunset sky, not looking a day older than they had looked twenty years ago, when Nancy had been a young girl walking and dreaming in their shadows. The old willow to the left was as big and sweeping and, Nancy thought with a little shudder, probably as caterpillary, as ever. Nancy had learned many things in her twenty years of exile from Avonlea, but she had never learned to conquer her dread of caterpillars.

“Nothing is much changed, Louisa,” she said, propping her chin on her plump white hands, and sniffing at the delectable odour of the bruised mint upon which Louisa was trampling. “I’m glad; I was afraid to come back for fear you would have improved the old garden out of existence, or else into some prim, orderly lawn, which would have been worse. It’s as magnificently untidy as ever, and the fence still wobbles. It CAN’T be the same fence, but it looks exactly like it. No, nothing is much changed. Thank you, Louisa.”

Louisa had not the faintest idea what Nancy was thanking her for, but then she had never been able to fathom Nancy, much as she had always liked her in the old girlhood days that now seemed much further away to Louisa than they did to Nancy. Louisa was separated from them by the fulness of wifehood and motherhood, while Nancy looked back only over the narrow gap that empty years make.

“You haven’t changed much yourself, Nancy,” she said, looking admiringly at Nancy’s trim figure, in the nurse’s uniform she had donned to show Louisa what it was like, her firm, pink-and-white face and the the glossy waves of her golden brown hair. “You’ve held your own wonderfully well.”

“Haven’t I?” said Nancy complacently. “Modern methods of massage and cold cream have kept away the crowsfeet, and fortunately I had the Rogerson complexion to start with. You wouldn’t think I was really thirty-eight, would you? Thirty-eight! Twenty years ago I thought anybody who was thirty-eight was a perfect female Methuselah. And now I feel so horribly, ridiculously young, Louisa. Every morning when I get up I have to say solemnly to myself three times, ‘You’re an old maid, Nancy Rogerson,’ to tone myself down to anything like a becoming attitude for the day.”

“I guess you don’t mind being an old maid much,” said Louisa, shrugging her shoulders. She would not have been an old maid herself for anything; yet she inconsistently envied Nancy her freedom, her wide life in the world, her unlined brow, and care-free lightness of spirit.

“Oh, but I do mind,” said Nancy frankly. “I hate being an old maid.”

“Why don’t you get married, then?” asked Louisa, paying an unconscious tribute to Nancy’s perennial chance by her use of the present tense.

Nancy shook her head.

“No, that wouldn’t suit me either. I don’t want to be married. Do you remember that story Anne Shirley used to tell long ago of the pupil who wanted to be a widow because ‘if you were married your husband bossed you and if you weren’t married people called you an old maid?’ Well, that is precisely my opinion. I’d like to be a widow. Then I’d have the freedom of the unmarried, with the kudos of the married. I could eat my cake and have it, too. Oh, to be a widow!”

“Nancy!” said Louisa in a shocked tone.