'No, it has not yet begun, Meg.'
'Oh, Michael! Oh, please, Michael.'
'And so do you think to-morrow you could bring yourself to kiss me of your own accord, just once, my darling?'
And now I am alone in my own little room for the last time, for by this hour to-morrow I shall have more 'experience,' I shall be linked up with all the other wedded lovers of the world: Charles Kingsley and Fanny Grenfell, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, William Gladstone and Catherine Glynn! Oh! poor old Dante! Why wasn't he content to love his Beatrice and not marry Gemma? But then the classics would have been the poorer. He might not have written his Inferno or said:—
'My wife
Of savage temper, more than aught beside
Hath to this evil brought me.'
What?
Oh, yes, I know he didn't actually say it of himself, but his own domestic hearth suggested it. And, anyway, I will not be reproved for ignorance of Dante by—the General Public.
FIFTEEN MONTHS LATER
'But when I became mature, I put away childish things.'
CHAPTER XII