Kitty

I read 'The Hours' by Michael Cunningham over the weekend, a wonderful book capturing the lives of three very different women, and made a note of this small passage. I liked it because it is just a nodding acknowledgment of the ageing process (Kitty is the friend and neighbour of Laura Brown):

"Kitty looks at her coffee cup with elaborately false, foolish absorption. She seems, briefly, like a simple, ordinary woman seated at a kitchen table. Her magic evaporates; it is possible to see how she'll look at fifty - she'll be fat, mannish, leathery, wry and ironic about her marriage, one of those women of whom people say, She used to be quite pretty, you know." (p.107)