Unlike Miss Amelia, she had not even a happy youth and a lover to look back upon; she had nothing, indeed, except her unfailing goodness and patience to support her.
"I don't like to see you alone, honey," she said, untying the strings of her black silk bonnet, which fitted her cheerful features like a frame.
"If the doctor hadn't told me to go to bed as soon as I came in, we'd sit a while with you for company." She felt that it was morbid and unnatural in Gabriella to sit alone in a dim room when there were so many young people out in the streets.

"You mark my words, there's some reason back of Gabriella's moping all by herself," she remarked to Miss Amelia as she took off her "things" a few minutes later.

"It wouldn't surprise me a bit to hear that she'd had a fuss with her sweetheart." "I declare, sister Jemima, you are too sentimental to live," observed Miss Amelia as she filled the tea kettle on the fender "Anybody would think to hear you talk that there was nothing in life except making love." "Well, there isn't anything else so interesting when you're young.

You used to think so yourself, sister Amelia." Standing gaunt and black, with the tea kettle held out stiffly before her, Miss Amelia turned her tragic face on her sister.
"Well, I reckon you don't know much about it," she responded with the unconscious cruelty of age.

Having been once the victim of a great passion, she had developed at last into an uncompromising realist, wholly devoid of sentimentality, while Miss Jemima, lacking experience, had enveloped the unknown in a rosy veil of illusion.
"You don't have to know a thing to think about it, sister Amelia," replied the invalid timidly as she put on her flannel wrapper and fastened it with a safety pin at the throat.
"Well, I reckon it's all right for a girl like Gabriella," said Miss Amelia crushingly, "but when you look back on it from my age, you'll know it isn't worth a row of pins in a life." And beside the window downstairs Gabriella was thinking passionately: "Shall I ever grow old?
Is it possible that I shall ever grow old like that ?" With the bare question, terror seized her--the terror of growing old without George, the terror of dying before she had known the full beauty of life.