"Yes, my very dear wife, I am quite sure. And you, are you sure, Leonora?"
"How serious you are!" she exclaimed, laughingly. "Well, perhaps I am not so sure as you are,—but I think I could." Somehow he did not smile; he took some things so seriously.
Honeymoon conversations are insignificant enough, but it would be well if they were still more so. They should be limited by an international law to the phrases contained in the works of M. Ollendorff.
"Is it a fine day, sir?"
"Yes, madam, it is a very fine day, but the baker has the green hat of the officer."
"Has the baker also the red cow of the general's wife?"
"No, madam, the baker has not the red cow of the general's wife, but the undertaker has the penknife of the aunt of the good butcher."
It would be hard for the most ill-disposed couple to quarrel if confined to this simple elegance of dialectics, where truths of the broadest kind are clothed in the purest and most energetic words. Young married people are allowed too much latitude when they are turned loose upon a whole language with a sort of standing order to make conversation. When they have exhausted a certain fund of stock poetry and enthusiasm, they have very little to fall back upon, except their personal relation to each other; and unless they are equally serious or equally frivolous, the discussion of such matters is apt to get them into trouble.
Like most Italians Marcantonio had difficulty in understanding English humour. When Leonora said she was not quite sure she loved him, she had meant it for a jest, and if the jest had a deeper meaning and a possibility of truth for herself, that was no reason, she thought, why Marcantonio should consider it no jest at all. She was somewhat annoyed, and she made up her mind that there must be an element of Philistinism in his character. She hated and feared Philistines, partly because they were bores, and partly because she had met one or two of them who had known vastly more than she did, and who had not scrupled to show it. But, after all, how could Marcantonio be really like them? He did not know very much, nor did he pretend to, and he had very good taste and was altogether very nice,—no, he was not a Philistine; he loved her, and that was the reason he was serious. All this she thought, springing from one idea to another, and ending by drawing her arm closer through his and moving along the terrace by his side.
The sun had set over there in front of them, and the air was cool and purple with the afterglow. They stood by the wall and looked out silently, without any further effort at conversation. Talking had been a failure, probably because they were tired, and for a brief space they were content to watch the clouds, and to listen to the swift rush of the swallows and the faint, soft fall of the small waves on the sand far below them. There they were, linked together, for better for worse, to meet the joys and the sorrows of life hand in hand; to stand before the world as representatives of their class, to play a part in public, and in their homes to be all in all to each other, man and wife.