"Oh, there is nothing romantic about that. If it were grass, the 'uncut hair of graves,' it would be different."
"Different! Is grass portentous? churchyard grass especially?"
"Every green blade of the earth must be 'churchyard grass' as you call it. It all springs up from life that was." She plucked a tuft from the bank as she spoke, and laid its moist blades in her lap.
"Then where's the omen?
"A silly one—an old Teutonic superstition. They believe that if the second husband of a woman treads the grave of the first, the grass will wave till the corpse awakes from its rest."
At this he chuckled joyously, her voice was so appropriately tragic.
"But here we've no second husbands, and no tombs; only a fanciful little wife who has burst the bonds of the matter of fact."
"Was I so prosaic?" She stared at the dancing gnats and flicked at them dreamily with her glove. "Ah, perhaps so—in the days when the pinch of penury forced one to be tough and calculating. You could not imagine, Harry, the fret of blue blood in starved veins. To be poor makes one mean, grasping, heartless; once rich, we can become amiable, virtuous, heroic even."
"And poetic, eh?" he said, flushing at the recollection of transformations that his love and his wealth had wrought for Cinderella. "Come, we must not forget the Lowthers' dinner, we're due there now."
With this he paddled out from their retreat, carefully—for the dusk was closing round them—into the open river.