“I suppose when you get married you will take a honeymoon.”
“I shall have more sense and more selfishness. A girl could hardly enter a new life through a medium more trying. I am sure it would need long-tested affections and the sweetest of tempers to make it endurable.”
“I cannot imagine what you mean.”
“I mean that all traveling just after marriage is a great blunder. Traveling makes the sunniest disposition hasty and peevish, for women don’t love changes as men do. Not one in a thousand is seen at her best while traveling, and the majority are seen at their very worst. Then there is the discomfort and desolation of European hotels—their mysterious methods and hours, and the ways of foreigners, which are not as our ways.”
“Don’t talk of them, Ethel. They are dreadful places, and such queer people.”
“Add to these troubles ignorance of language and coinage, the utter weariness of railway travel, the plague of customs, the trunk that won’t pack, the trains that won’t wait, the tiresome sight-seeing, the climatic irritability, broiling suns, headache, loneliness, fretfulness—consequently the pitiful boredom of the new husband.”
“Ethel, what you say is certainly too true. I am weary to death of it all. I want to be at Newport with mother, who is having a lovely time there. Of course Basil is very nice to me, and yet there have been little tiffs and struggles—very gentle ones—for the mastery, which he is not going to get. To-day he wanted me to go with him and Canon Shackleton to see something or other about the poor of London. I would not do it. I am so lonely, Ethel, I want to see some one. I feel fit to cry all the time. I like Basil best of anyone in the world, but——”
“But in the solitude of a honeymoon among strangers you find out that the person you like best in the world can bore you as badly as the person you don’t like at all. Is that so?”
“Exactly. Just fancy if we were among our friends in Newport. I should have some pleasure in dressing and looking lovely. Why should I dress here? There is no one to see me.”
“Basil.”