"Who's this little girl?" asked Jane.
"It's me!"
The two girls held onto it.
"But it doesn't look like you," said Jane simply. "Anybody could get a picture like this, somewhere."
They looked at her for a long moment.
"Any more pictures, Mrs. Bentley?" asked Alice. "Of you, later? You got a picture of you at fifteen, and one at twenty, and one at forty and fifty?"
The girls chortled.
"I don't have to show you anything!" said Mrs. Bentley.
"Then we don't have to believe you," replied Jane.
"But this picture proves I was young!"
"That's some other little girl, like us. You borrowed it."
"I was married!"
"Where's Mr. Bentley?"
"He's been gone a long time. If he were here, he'd tell you how young and pretty I was when I was twenty-two."
"But he's not here and he can't tell, so what does that prove?"
"I have a marriage certificate."
"You could have borrowed that, too. Only way I'll believe you were ever young"--Jane shut her eyes to emphasize how sure she was of herself--"is if you have someone say they saw you when you were ten."
"Thousands of people saw me but they're dead, you little fool--or ill, in other towns. I don't know a soul here, just moved here a few years ago, so no one saw me young."
"Well, there you are!" Jane blinked at her companions. "Nobody saw her!"
"Listen!" Mrs. Bentley seized the girl's wrist. "You must take these things on faith. Someday you'll be as old as I. People will say the same. 'Oh, no,' they'll say, 'those vultures were never hummingbirds, those owls were never orioles, those parrots were never bluebirds!' One day you'll be like me!"
"No, we won't!" said the girls. "Will we?" they asked one another.
"Wait and see!" said Mrs. Bentley.
And to herself she thought, Oh, God, children are children, old women are old women, and nothing in between. They can't imagine a change they can't see.
"Your mother," she said to Jane. "Haven't you noticed, over the years, the change?"
"No," said Jane. "She's always the same."
And that was true. You lived with people every day and they never altered a degree. It was only when people had been off on a long trip, for years, that they shocked you. And she felt like a woman who has been on a roaring black train for seventy-two years, landing at last upon the rail platform and everyone crying: "Helen Bentley, is that you?"
"I guess we better go home," said Jane. "Thanks for the ring. It just fits me."
"Thanks for the comb. It's fine."
"Thanks for the picture of the little girl."
"Come back--you can't have those!" Mrs. Bentley shouted as they raced down the steps. "They're mine!"