She is
a good deal my junior; six months ago she was seventeen; when she is
eighteen we are to marry."
He related all this calmly enough, without the accent of complaint, drily
rather and doggedly, as if he were weary of thinking of it. "It's a
romance, indeed, for these dull days," I said, "and I heartily
congratulate you. It's not every young man who finds, on reaching the
marrying age, a wife kept in a box of rose-leaves for him. A thousand to
one Miss Vernor is charming; I wonder you don't post off to Smyrna."
"You are joking," he answered, with a wounded air, "and I am terribly
serious. Let me tell you the rest. I never suspected this superior
conspiracy till something less than a year ago. My father, wishing to
provide against his death, informed me of it very solemnly. I was
neither elated nor depressed; I received it, as I remember, with a sort
of emotion which varied only in degree from that with which I could have
hailed the announcement that he had ordered me a set of new shirts. I
supposed that was the way that all marriages were made; I had heard of
their being made in heaven, and what was my father but a divinity? Novels
and poems, indeed, talked about falling in love; but novels and poems
were one thing and life was another.
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