I
“We have been married exactly fifty-four minutes,” said Maurice, “and I still love you.”
“I can’t believe it!” answered Eleanor.
As she was thirty-nine and he nineteen, her incredulity was not strange, but, after all, fifty-four minutes lacks a full six minutes of being an hour.
They were islanded in rippling tides of windblown grass, with the warm fragrance of dropping locust blossoms enfolding them and in their ears the endless murmur of the river.
“We must spend our golden wedding here, under this tree,” he said.
She made a mental calculation. She was twice his age. At their golden wedding he would be sixty-nine and she twice that—one hundred and thirty-eight! It seemed hopeless. Would it last forever? Such a little thing might—throw the switches.
Six minutes had elapsed. “I wish,” said Maurice very low in his mind, “I wish I could die, right now!” Tempus, edax amoris!