“And you? You look like a young girl. We have allowed old Bellini to make fools of us. I felt that something was wrong.”
“No, darling, I thought so first.”
“Probably you did; that is because you are younger than I am.”
“No, you....”
And husband and wife, like a couple of children, laughingly quarrel over the question of which of them is the elder of the two, and cannot understand how they could have discovered lines and grey hairs where there are none.
PROLIFICACY
He was a supernumerary at the Board of Trade and drew a salary of twelve hundred crowns. He had married a young girl without a penny; for love, as he himself said, to be no longer compelled to go to dances and run about the streets, as his friends maintained. But be that as it may, the life of the newly-wedded couple was happy enough to begin with.
“How cheaply married people can live,” he said one day, after the wedding was a thing of the past. The same sum which had been barely enough to cover the wants of the bachelor now sufficed for husband and wife. Really, marriage was an excellent institution. One had all one’s requirements within one’s four walls: club, cafe, everything; no more bills of fare, no tips, no inquisitive porter watching one as one went out with one’s wife in the morning.