"Are you quite sure?" asked Rosalind, with an unconvinced half-smile.
"Absolutely."
"I thought," she continued, "that it was just the other way about; that it was presence and not absence that made the heart of man grow fonder, and that if a man's best girl, so to say, was away, he was able to make himself very comfortable with his second-best!"
"In some cases, of course, it's true," I answered, unmoved; "but with a love like yours and Orlando's, it's quite different."
"Oh, do you really mean it?"
"Certainly I do; and your mistake has been in supposing that an experiment which no few every-day married couples would be only too glad to try, was ever meant for two such love-birds as you. Laws and systems are meant for the unhappy and the untractable, not for people like you, for whom Love makes its own laws."
"Yes, that is what we used to say; and indeed, we thought that this was one of love's laws,—this experiment, as you call it."
"But it was quite a mistake," I went on in my character as matrimonial oracle. "Love never made a law so cruel, a law that would rob true lovers of each other's society for a whole month in a year, stretching them on the rack of absence—" There my period broke down, so I began another less ambitiously planned.
"A whole month in a year! Think what that would mean in a lifetime. How long do you expect to live and love together? Say another fifty years at the most. Well, fifty ones are fifty. Fifty months equal—four twelves are forty-eight and two over—four years and two months. Yes, out of the short life God allows even for the longest love you would voluntarily throw away four years and two months!"
This impressive calculation had a great effect on poor Rosalind; and it is a secondary matter that it and its accompanying wisdom may have less weight with the reader, as for the moment Rosalind was my one concern.