"But you don't know how poor we'll be."
"Oh, don't I? Where do you think I keep my eyes? Why, I expect to be poor when I marry—for a while at any rate. I expect to do my own housework, like most of the young married women I know."
"Oh, but you've always talked so much about servants."
"Yes, dear Tom, but that was to be on a desert island where we were to be all alone. We shan't find that island except in our hearts."
"But even without the island, I always supposed that when a girl like you got married she...."
"She began with an establishment on the scale of ours in Louisburg Square, at the least. Yes, that used to be the way, twenty or thirty years ago. But I'm sorry to say it isn't so any longer. Talk about revolution! We've got revolution as it is. With rents and wages as they are, and all the other expenses, why, a young couple must begin with the simple life, or stay single. I'd rather begin with the simple life, and I know more about it than you think."
He laughed. "So I see."
"Oh, I can cook and sew and make beds and wash dishes...."
They sauntered on, without noticing where they were going, till they came to a dell, where in the shade of an elm there was a seat, and another near a heart-shaped clump of lilacs, all in bloom. They sat in the shade of the elm. They were practical young lovers, and yet they were young lovers. They were lovers for whom there had never been any lovers but themselves. The wonderful thing was that each felt what the other felt; the discoveries by which they had come to the knowledge of this fact were the first that had ever been made.