“And young women? What of their ambitions?” I laugh. “I am hardly young.” Carmilla’s age is hard to determine, though now I try—there are no lines on her face, nor gray in her hair, but she holds herself with such ease and certainty, I think her closer to my age than Cora’s. “Are you not the same age as your husband?” The footmen arrive to change the savory for the sweet, a dish of strawberry cream and a raspberry tart with custard. “It is different for women,” I say when we are alone again. “How so? Do the natural processes of aging not affect men? Do they not grow slow and gray-haired?”
