She was older than Peter--must have been: I never knew exactly. It
would not have been wise to ask her, and nobody else knew but
Peter, and he never told. And yet there was no mark of real old
age upon her. She and Peter were alike in this. Her hair, worn
Pompadour, was gray--an honest black-and-white gray; her eyes were
bright as needle points; the skin slightly wrinkled, but fresh and
rosy--a spare, straight, well-groomed old lady of--perhaps sixty
--perhaps sixty-five, depending on her dress, or undress, for her
shoulders were still full and well rounded. "The most beautiful
neck and throat, sir, in all Washington in her day," old General
Waterbury once told me, and the General was an authority. "You
should have seen her in her prime, sir. What the devil the men
were thinking of I don't know, but they let her go back to
Geneseo, and there she has lived ever since. Why, sir, at a ball
at the German Embassy she made such a sensation that--" but then
the General always tells such stories of most of the women he
knows.
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