"My love!" said the Captain, with deference, "Do you think, in all the circumstances—April afternoon, a highly intellectual audience, and the surroundings of youth—that you could manage to recite your set of verses?"
The old lady protested modestly. She had written them, it appeared, in the early sixties, and she argued that fashions in poetry changed as in everything else. We insisted, and she gave, with gesture and a rapt expression, some lines about trees and bees, and birds and words, and flowers and bowers; her husband listened eagerly with a hand at ear, and occasionally prompting her when memory failed. Cartwright and I ejaculated at the end, "Beautiful, beautiful!" and Captain Winterton said we might be interested to know that these verses were composed not many yards away, under an elm which had, most unfortunately, been blown down in the gale of '81. But he could shew us a still more interesting feature of the past in the shape of the oak that witnessed his proposal to the lady whom he now had the honour to call his wife. We had to see this, and as we left the elderly couple, we heard him say:
"My love, I never heard you give those lines with greater force and expression."
And she remarked:
"My dear, I hope we didn't bore the young people."
I took pains to assure the Quartermaster-Sergeant, in walking along the avenue, that the Wintertons were genuine in their admiration for each other, and he declared that, of this, he had no doubt. He seemed rather quiet, and I asked him what he was thinking of; he answered that it would be many days ere he managed to send the Wintertons out of his mind.
"What I mean to say is," he explained, "married all these long years, and always in each other's company, and still on friendly terms! Why, it's the greatest achievement that anyone can hope for." I remarked that the two might be looked upon as exceptions. "Granted," he said, taking my arm, "but why are they exceptions? There's no good reason why they should be exceptions. If they can do it, anybody can do it, and a happy old age ought to become the general rule."
"Perhaps hasty marriages are sometimes to blame."
"Ah!" releasing my arm. "Hadn't thought of that. I suppose it's pretty safe to assume that they are usually a mistake. Glad you reminded me."