'Why, Cuthbert, you must have been reading tragedy lately.'
'What makes you think so?'
'Because it is only tragedy which is so merciful in finishing us up in a speedy, impressive manner when things go wrong, till at last the ghosts have to come on the stage to explain how people fell over a precipice.'
'Every word you say there makes me feel afresh how disastrous it would be for you to risk a mariage de convenance, or marriage with anyone to whom you could not look up in some measure, with whom you would not have that deeper mental bond without which marriage, in some cases, is not justifiable.'
'Well, it seems to me that marriage of all subjects is the one that most eludes dogmatizing about to any successful issue.'
'I admit that; but the more difficult a position is, the more one must avoid an obvious danger.'
'"To save the soul," says one of the old Spanish saints, "it is necessary to have as little intercourse with people as possible."'
'Please don't say that in order to be happy in marriage the same axiom applies; for you are quite capable of proving it,' said the young man laughingly.
'Did you ever notice a funny old book in tarnished gold that was given to Grandmother Loudon on her wedding-day, called "Letters to a Granddaughter"?'
'Yes; I never read it, but I always understood it was published for private circulation only by an ancestress of our own.'