Mrs. Oliphant

“ Your old age has been very pleasant——"
"Ah! you acknowledge that I am old, then?" cried Lady Mary with a smile.
"You are old no longer, and you are a great lady no longer. Don't you see that something has happened to you? It is seldom that such a great change happens without being found out."
"Yes; it is true I have got better all at once. I feel an extraordinary renewal of strength. I seem to have left home without knowing it; none of my people seem near me. I feel very much as if I had just awakened from a long dream. ”

“ Now all who could call her by her Christian name were dead years ago—therefore it must be a dream. However, in a short time it was repeated,—"Mary, Mary! get up; there is a great deal to do." This voice confused her greatly. Was it possible that all that was past had been mere fancy, that she had but dreamed those long, long years—maturity and motherhood, and trouble and triumph, and old age at the end of all? It seemed to her possible that she might have dreamed the rest, for she had been a girl much given to visions; but she said to herself that she never could have dreamed old age. ”

“ She had always been fond of discussions of this kind, and felt encouraged to find that they were still practicable. "It cannot be the——Inferno; that is clear, at least," she added, with the sprightliness which was one of her characteristics; "perhaps—Purgatory? since you infer I have something to endure."
"Words are interchangeable," he said: "that means one thing to one of us which to another has a totally different signification." There was something so like his old self in this, that she laughed with an irresistible sense of amusement. ”