Young People's Pride by Stephen Vincent Benet

"You simply must not worry yourself about it so, Nancy, my darling," says Mrs. Ellicott brightly. "Lovers' quarrels are only lovers' quarrels you know and they seem very small indeed to people a little older and more experienced though I daresay they may loom terribly large just at present. Why your father and myself used to have -- ahem -- our little times over _trifles_, darling, mere _trifles _" and Mrs. Ellicott takes a pinch of air between finger and thumb as if to display it as a specimen of those mere trifles over which Mr. and Mrs. Ellicott used to become proudly enraged at each other in the days before she had faded him so completely.

Nancy, after a night of intensive sleeplessness broken only by dreams of seeing Oliver being married to somebody else in the lobby of the Hotel Rosario can only wonder rather dully when it could ever have been that poor father was allowed enough initiative of his own to take even the passive part in a quarrel over a trifle and why mother thinks the prospect implied in her speech of her daughter's marriage being like unto hers can be so comforting. Nancy made one New Year's resolution the second day of her engagement, "If I ever find myself starting to act to Ollie the way mother does to father I'll simply have to leave him and never see him again. " But Mrs. Ellicott goes on.