“No; because our love is so colossal. How can it have grown so tremendous in so short a time?”
“Romeo and Juliet’s love grew in a single night.”
“Ah, that was in Italy—and for stage effect. I don’t think much of a passion that springs up in a night, like one of those great red fungi which one sees in this wood on an October morning. I should like our love to be as strong and as deep-rooted as that old oak over there, with its rugged grey roots cleaving the ground.”
“Why, so it is; or it will be by the time we celebrate our golden wedding.”
“Our golden wedding! Yes, if we go on living we must be old and grey some day. It seems hard, doesn’t it? How happy those Greek gods and goddesses were, to be for ever young! It seems hard that we must change from what we are now. I cannot think of myself as an old woman, in a black silk gown and a cap. A cap!” she interjected, with ineffable disgust, and an involuntary movement of her ungloved hand to the coils of bright hair which were shining uncovered in the sun. “And you with grey hair and wrinkles! Wrinkles in your face! That is what your favourite Spencer calls ‘Unthinkable.’ Stay”—looking at him searchingly in the merciless summer light. “Why, I declare there is just one wrinkle already. Just one perpendicular wrinkle! That means care, does it not?”
“What care can I have when I have you, except the fear of losing you?”
“Ah, you can have no such fear. I think, like Juliet, ‘I should have had more cunning to be strange.’ I let you see too soon that I adored you. I made myself too cheap.”
“No more than the stars are cheap. We may all see them and worship them.”
“But that deep perpendicular line, Jack. It must mean something. I have been reading Darwin on Expression, remember.”
“Spencer—Darwin. You are getting far too learned. I liked you better in your ignorance.”