"If," said Fanny, with the air of a mother speaking to her child, "if you don't eat your ice I will never take you shopping with me again. Please eat it, I feel so greedy eating alone."
Mr Hancock seized a spoon and attacked the formidable structure before him.
"I hope I'll never grow old," sighed Miss Lambert, as Hermann approached them with a huge dish of fantastic-looking cakes—cakes crusted with sugar and chocolate, Moscow Gâteaux simply sodden with rum, and Merangues filled with cream rich as Devonshire could make it.
"We must all grow old," said Hancock, staring with ghastly eyes at these atrocities. "But why do you specially fear age? Age has its beauties, it must come to us all."
"I don't want to grow old," said his companion, "because then I would not care for sweets any more. Father says the older he grows the less he cares for sweets, and that every one loses their sweet tooth at fifty. I hope I'll never lose mine; if I do I'll—get a false one."
Mr Hancock leisurely helped himself to one of the largest and sweetest-looking of the specimens of "Italian confectionery" before him; Fanny helped herself to its twin, and there was silence for a moment.
It is strange that whilst a man may admit his age to a woman he cares for, by word of mouth, he will do much before he admits it by his actions.
CHAPTER IV A MEETING
Of all places in the world the Zoo is, perhaps, the most uninspiring to your diffident lover, but Mr Hancock was fond of zoology. It was a mild sort of hobby which he cultivated in his few leisure moments, and he was not displeased to air his knowledge before his pretty friend, and to show her that he had a taste for things other than forensic. Accordingly in the Bird House he began to show off. This was a mistake. If you have a hobby, conceal it till after marriage. The man with a hobby, once he lets himself loose upon his pet subject or occupation, always bores. He is like a man in drink, he does not know the extent of his own stupidity; lost in his own paradise he is unconscious of the trouble and weariness he is inflicting on the unfortunates who happen to be his companions—unlike a man in drink, he is rarely amusing.