"Yes. No more than that."
"Yes, it is more," cried Mina. "Without it he'd never have married Cecily."
"Romance, Madame Zabriska, romance!" Southend shook his head at her severely.
Mina flinched a little under the opprobrium of the word. Yet why? In these days we have come to recognize—indeed there has been small choice in the matter, unless a man would throw away books and wear cotton-wool in his ears—that the romance of one generation makes the realities of the next, and that a love-affair twenty years old becomes a problem in heredity, demanding the attention of the learned, and receiving that of the general public also. So that though the affair and the man be to all seeming insignificant, consolation may be found in the prospect of a posthumous importance; and he who did nothing very visible in his lifetime may, when his son's biography comes to be written, be held grandfather to an epic poem or a murder on the high seas—and it seems to be considered that it is touch and go which way the thing turns out. Are there then any episodes left? Does not everything become an enterprise of great pith and moment, with results that will probably, some day or other, be found to admit of mathematical demonstration? Happily the human race, in practice if not in theory, declines the conclusion. We know that we are free, and there's an end of it, said Dr Johnson. Well, at least we can still think that we are doing what we like—and that's the beginning of most things.
That temporary inferiority of Bob Broadley's, on which Cecily had touched so feelingly, was soon redressed, and after the wedding Harry had a talk with the bride. It was not unnatural that she should blush a little when he spoke to her—a passing tribute to the thought of what might have been. Harry greeted it with a laugh.
"I suppose we'd better be straightforward about
this?" he said. "Mingham's so near Blent, you see. We're both very glad, aren't we, Mrs Broadley?"
"I imagine so," said Janie. "You show no signs of pining anyhow."
"And as to our behavior—there's not a father in the kingdom who wouldn't think us right."