"Oh, it is tiresome that you must always have these scenes when you return, they spoil everything. You force me to seem cruel. Why can't you accept the situation?"
"Because I am a man and you are a woman," and his eyes sought hers with passion, "and all the rest of emotion is but make-believe; the only real part is the tangible. To have and to hold, to clasp and to kiss, to strain the loved one next the heart—Katherine, you make me suffer the tortures of the damned."
"No—you permit yourself to suffer them, that makes all the difference. If I made you, then I should feel as wicked as you say my lips look."
Here Lady Beatrice interrupted them in her plaintive, drawling voice.
"Gerard, can you imagine it! Aunt Sarah has just had a letter from Tom Hawthorne by the evening's post, announcing that Läo has quietly married that boy in Paris, and they are going to Monte Carlo for their honeymoon! Isn't it quite too tragic for them, poor things!"
Lady Garribardine joined the group, with the epistle in her hand.
"Läo was always a fool, but I believed even the sense of a rabbit would have kept her from this!"
"They are madly in love, dear Sarah!" old Gwendoline d'Estaire said sentimentally.
Her ladyship snorted.
"Tut, tut! Läo is forty-two years old and the boy not more than six and twenty, sixteen years between them! Quite an immaterial discrepancy while he remained a lover—but a menace which even the strongest brain cannot combat when the creature turns into a husband. The situation is ridiculous at once. It means that the woman has to spend her time not only fighting old age as we all have to do, but watching for every sign of weariness in the youth, trembling at every fresh wrinkle in herself, and always on the tiptoe of anxiety, so that she loses whatever charm lured the poor child into her net."