“I leave for New York to-night. Now that the young lovers have plighted their troth my presence is no longer necessary. A sudden telegram will arrive.”
“But Mrs. Spinney? We have begun to—er—hope—”
“Hope?”
“Begun to think—wondered if—”
“I were going to marry a woman several years my senior who has the effrontery to believe that she can lecture acceptably on the entire range of literary and social knowledge from the Troubadours and the Crusades to Rudyard Kipling and the Referendum? Such is the reward of disinterested self-sacrifice!”
“Forgive me, George. I knew at first that you were trying to do me a good turn, but—but you were so persistent that you deceived us. I’m really glad there’s nothing in it.”
“Thanks awfully.” Then bending a sardonic glance on my friend, I murmured sententiously:
“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is Winged Cupid painted blind.”
“Edna, why don’t you take a more active interest in these club gatherings?” asked Morgan Russell one afternoon eight years subsequent to their marriage. He had laid aside his work for the day, and having joined his wife on the piazza was glancing over a printed notice of a meeting which she had left on the table. “I’m inclined to think you would get considerable diversion from them, and the study work at home would be in your line.”