been permitted as much as fifty years by a judge competent anywhere
over the world save in Hawaii.  Yet her children and her
grandchildren, and Roscoe Scandwell who had been her husband for
forty years, knew that she was sixty-four and would be sixty-five
come the next twenty-second day of June.  But she did not look it,
despite the fact that she thrust reading glasses on her nose as she
read her magazine and took them off when her gaze desired to wander
in the direction of the half-dozen children playing on the lawn. 

It was a noble situation--noble as the ancient hau tree, the size
of a house, where she sat as if in a house, so spaciously and
comfortably house-like was its shade furnished; noble as the lawn
that stretched away landward its plush of green at an appraisement
of two hundred dollars a front foot to a bungalow equally
dignified, noble, and costly.  Seaward, glimpsed through a fringe
of hundred-foot coconut palms, was the ocean; beyond the reef a
dark blue that grew indigo blue to the horizon, within the reef all
the silken gamut of jade and emerald and tourmaline. 

And this was but one house of the half-dozen houses belonging to