“With all the experience of the ages against its coming out right.” She had turned to move toward a chair, but looked now over her shoulder at him. “Have you ever seen what seemed to you an absolutely happy marriage in your life?”
Upon reflection he shook his head. “I don't recall one on the spur of the minute,” he confessed. “Not the kind, I mean, that you read about in books. But I've seen plenty where the couple got along together in a good, easy, comfortable sort of way, without a notion of any sort of unpleasantness. It's people who marry too young who do most of the fighting, I imagine. After people have got to a sensible age, and know what they want and what they can get along without, why then there's no reason for any trouble. We don't start out with any school-boy and school-girl moonshine.”
“Oh, there's a good deal to be said for the moonshine,” she interrupted him, as she sank upon the sofa.
“Why certainly,” he assented, amiably, as he stood looking down at her. “The more there is of it, the better--if it comes naturally, and people know enough to understand that it is moonshine, and isn't the be-all and end-all of everything.”
“There's a lover for you!” Miss Madden cried, with mirth and derision mingled in her laugh.
“Don't you worry about me,” he told her. “I'm a good enough lover, all right. And when you come to that, if Edith is satisfied, I don't precisely see what----”
“What business it is of mine?” she finished the sentence for him. “You're entirely right. As you say, IF she's satisfied, no one else has anything to do with it.”
“But have you got any right to assume that she isn't satisfied?” he asked her with swift directness--“or any reason for supposing it?”
Miss Madden shook her head, but the negation seemed qualified by the whimsical smile she gave him. “None whatever,” she said--and on the instant the talk was extinguished by the entrance of Lady Cressage.
Thorpe's vision was flooded with the perception of his rare fortune as he went to meet her. He took the hand she offered, and looked into the smile of her greeting, and could say nothing. Her beauty had gathered to it new forces in his eyes--forces which dazzled and troubled his glance. The thought that this exquisite being--this ineffable compound of feeling and fine nerves and sweet wisdom and wit and loveliness--belonged to him seemed too vast for the capacity of his mind. He could not keep himself from trembling a little, and from diverting to a screen beyond her shoulder a gaze which he felt to be overtly dimmed and embarrassed.