"Gave every man his neighbour's wife, did you? I dare say that some of them would not have objected to the arrangement."
"I married that old man" (indicating with the slightest possible motion of her head the persons alluded to) "to that old woman; I wish it was not ill-manners to point. They both looked so red and pursy and consequential, as if they had been telling each other for the last thirty years what swells they were!"
"Which old man to which old woman? Oh! I see."
"They are rather like one another, too," she continues, gravely; "and you know people say that, however unlike they may be at starting, merely by dint of living together, man and wife grow alike."
"Do they?" he says, a transient thought flashing through his mind as to whether, after twenty years of wedlock, that blooming peach face would have gained any likeness to his hard, mahogany one. "But how did you find out your mistake?"
"He put down her cup for her so politely just now, that I knew he could not be her husband."
He looks amused. "You are rather young to be so severe upon wedded bliss."
"Was I severe?" she asks, naïvely; "I did not know it; but, you know, a man may be fond of his wife, may be kind to her, but can hardly be said to be polite: politeness implies distance."
"Does it?" he says, involuntarily drawing his chair closer to hers, and leaning forward under pretence of looking at the flowers that make a scarlet fire in her hair. "By-the-by, how does the gum answer?"
She forgets to reply to his harmless question, while her eyes fall troubled, half-frightened: the eyes that cannot, without a theft upon a third person, give him back his tender looks—the eyes in whose pupils Brandon is to see himself reflected for the next forty, fifty, sixty years.