"I was wondering whether it was possible that you could be forty-one." "You brute," she exclaimed, with uplifted eyebrows.

"How dare you?
Forty if you like--for as long as you like.

Forty is the fashionable age, but one year over that is fatal.

Don't you know that now-a-days a woman goes straight from forty to sixty?
It is such a delicious long rest.

And besides, it gives a woman an object in life which she has probably been groping about for all her days.