"Oh, Vel is in the secret!" exclaimed the first speaker. "Tell us, is she dark or fair?—fair for a guinea! for this morning at breakfast he was raving about golden hair, and cheeks blushing like the inside of a sea-shell, which the amorous sea bathes in tears."
"Poetically described," said Lord Randolph, colouring slightly; and almost inadvertently his eye rested on Tremenhere, who was pale and silent. "I shall, probably, never marry," continued he; "that is, not till I grow a cranky old bachelor."
"You have changed," said Tremenhere in rather a low tone, feeling it necessary to say something; "and not for the better, I think. If people must marry, why, let them do it in youth—that is, not extreme youth, but not with too much disparity—a year or two on the man's side."
"Only that!" exclaimed Burton sarcastically, half addressing Tremenhere, who looked him full in the face, but made no reply; the blood, however, painfully rose to his brow. The remark was not lost where he intended it to tell.
"The misfortune is," said one of the guests, "that we men do not gain wisdom with age—our wise teeth are the first to decay and desert us. We forget how many years have gone over our heads; and at sixty expect some lovely girl of twenty to love us for ourselves alone."
"A grave error," answered Tremenhere, laughing. He was resolved, if possible, to chase painful thought, and the cold, unfounded suspicions gathering round his heart. "For an old man, marrying a young girl, generally becomes like a hoop in a child's hands; which it trundles before it whither it will, giving it hard knocks at every step!"
"Bravo!" cried several.
"It is not always thus," said their host, laughing. "Some old fellows weary their young wives to death; these always remind me of a punishment I have read of somewhere, where a living person was chained to a corpse till death came—some old men are brutes."
"I'd poison such a one!" exclaimed one man, laughing.
"I know such a being now," responded Lord Randolph, "with his hair dyed a purple black, idem whiskers, and one of our celebrated dentists is guilty of affording him the means of mastication, and life."