Kirstie had many causes of distress.

More and more as we grow old--and yet more and more as we grow old and are women, frozen by the fear of age--we come to rely on the voice as the single outlet of the soul.

Only thus, in the curtailment of our means, can we relieve the straitened cry of the passion within us; only thus, in the bitter and sensitive shyness of advancing years, can we maintain relations with those vivacious figures of the young that still show before us and tend daily to become no more than the moving wall-paper of life.

Talk is the last link, the last relation.

But with the end of the conversation, when the voice stops and the bright face of the listener is turned away, solitude falls again on the bruised heart.