"'And you like this ring? Ah, it has indeed a luster since your eyes have shone on it! Henceforth hold me, sweet enchantress, the Slave of the Ring!'" he answers, in impassioned accents.
"Oh, dear," muses Addie, "what high-flown rubbish! I don't think such wooing would win me. Pauline must be of different metal—rather soft metal, I should say. 'Sweet enchantress,' 'slave of the ring!' I'm glad Tom didn't make such a fool of himself when—when we were courting. Heigh-ho, what a long afternoon it is! I wonder will the boys turn up early? Robert has not been here for two Saturdays running. I—"
"'There is something glorious in the heritage of command. A man who has ancestors is like a representative of the past,'" says Pauline, in haughty melodramatic accents.
"Stuff, Pauline, stuff!" mutters her sister, impatiently tugging at her knotted thread. "Precious heritage of command our ancestors have given us! Nice representatives some of our forefathers were! If Bob or Hal took to representing them, I wonder what—"
"'Ah, Pauline, not to the past, but to the future looks true nobility, and finds its blazon in posterity.'"
"Come, that sounds like nonsense, as well as I can make out. Why, Jack Everard, will you always speak to Pauline as if your windpipe were padded with cotton-wool; it can't make her love you, and it is so exasperating when you want to hear—"
"'No, no, I would not, were I fifty times a prince, be a pensioner on the dead. I honor birth and ancestry when they are regarded as the incentives to exertion, not the title-deeds to sloth!'"
"'Not the title-deeds to sloth!'" repeats Addie, leaning forward eagerly to catch the falling cadence of his voice as it approaches a period.
"'It is our fathers I emulate when I desire that beneath the evergreen I myself have planted my own ashes may repose. Dearest, couldst thou see with my eyes!'"
Addie, looking up, sees her husband standing inside the door, smiling at the fireside duet. She beckons him to her, noiselessly makes room for him on the couch, and with her finger pressed to her lips motions him to listen.