Among the trees the wagon waited pitifully to take them back from their dingy cheer to their dull homes. It was rendered only the more pitiful by a strip of red-white-and-blue bunting. A coat of paint would have become it better.
While the horses cropped the grass soberly a pack of substantial wives cleared away such part of the débris of the banquet as was not scattered about the ground.
As Forbes and Persis rounded the turn that disclosed the revelers a homely couple evidently in search of a less populous nook severed a highly unromantic-looking clasp. It was hard to see how either took much pleasure from the other. The man was in his shirt-sleeves, with his hat askew; the girl, shapeless and freckled, in a shapeless freckled dress. They squinted their eyes against the sun, gaped at the tailor-made couple on the varnished horses, and stumbled in the roadside gully to let them pass.
"Isn't it ghastly?" Persis whispered. "They were trying to spoon—just as we were. And we both broke up both of us. It makes love rather a silly, shabby spectacle, doesn't it?"
"I don't think so," Forbes said. "I should say that instead of their making love shabby, love covered them with a little glory."
"That's a much prettier way to put it. But shabby people—oh Lord! Look at that family, dear! If that's wedded bliss, give me chloroform."
It was a doleful exhibit on the edge of the woods: a fat, paunchy, sweaty man was taking his picnic in carrying a squally, messy baby. Alongside him a bunchy woman with stringy hair waddled in answering stupidity, hanging to her husband's suspenders.
"You can't tell which of them's going to have the next one," Persis commented, before she caught herself. "Forgive me, I didn't realize how it would sound."
Forbes laughed sheepishly. "It was what I was thinking, too."
As they rode on she shuddered. "What an odious thing to be like that! Suppose you lost your job in the army and we got very poor, and I had to take in washing, and we had a lot of children; should we be like that, do you think?—should we?"