“How ignorant I was”—with a long-drawn sigh—“till you began to educate me! Poor dear Mütterchen never taught us anything but the multiplication table and a little French grammar. We used to devour Scott, and Dickens, and Bulwer, and Thackeray. The books on our shelves will tell you how they have been read. They have been done to rags with reading. They are dropping to pieces like over-boiled fowls. And we know our Shakespeare—we have learnt him by heart. We used to make our winter nights merry acting Shakesperean scenes to Nancy and the parlour-maid. They were our only audience. But, except those dear novelists and Shakespeare, we read nothing. History was a blank; philosophy a word without meaning. You introduced me to the world of learned authors.”
“Was I wise? Was it not something like Satan’s introduction of Eve to the apple?”
“Wise or foolish, you gave me Darwin. And now I want to know what kind of trouble it was that made that line upon your forehead. Some foolish love affair, perhaps. You were in love—ever so much deeper in love than you are with me.”
“No, my dearest. All my earlier loves were lighter than vanity—no more than Romeo’s boyish passion for Rosaline.”
“What other care, then? You, who are so rich, can have no money cares.”
“Can I not? Imprimis, I am not rich; and then what income I have is derived chiefly from agricultural land cut up into smallish farms, with homesteads, and barns, and cowhouses, that seem always ready to tumble about the tenant’s ears, unless I spend half a year’s rent in repairs.”
“Dear, picturesque old homesteads, I’ve no doubt.”
“Eminently picturesque, but very troublesome to own.”
“And did repairs—the cost of roofs and drainpipes—write that deep line on your brow?”
“Perhaps. Or it may be only a habit of frowning, and of trying to emulate the eagles in looking at the sun.”