The Venetians by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

If Easter had been a time of happiness for Vansittart and Eve, bringing with it the revelation of mutual love, Whitsuntide was no less happy; happier, perhaps, in its serene security, and in the familiarity of a love which seemed to have lasted for a long time.

"Only seven weeks! " exclaimed Eve, in one of their wanderings among the many cattle-tracks on Bexley Hill, no sound of life or movement in all the world around them save the hum of insects and the chime of cow bells. "To think that we have been engaged only seven weeks! It seems a lifetime."

"Because you are so weary of me? " asked Vansittart, with a lover's fatuous smile.

"No; because our love is so colossal. How can it have grown so tremendous in so short a time?"

"Romeo and Juliet's love grew in a single night."

"Ah, that was in Italy -- and for stage effect. I don't think much of a passion that springs up in a night, like one of those great red fungi which one sees in this wood on an October morning. I should like our love to be as strong and as deep-rooted as that old oak over there, with its rugged grey roots cleaving the ground."

"Why, so it is; or it will be by the time we celebrate our golden wedding."

"Our golden wedding! Yes, if we go on living we must be old and grey some day. It seems hard, doesn't it? How happy those Greek gods and goddesses were, to be for ever young! It seems hard that we must change from what we are now. I cannot think of myself as an old woman, in a black silk gown and a cap. A cap! " she interjected, with ineffable disgust, and an involuntary movement of her ungloved hand to the coils of bright hair which were shining uncovered in the sun. "And you with grey hair and wrinkles! Wrinkles in _your_ face! That is what your favourite Spencer calls ‘Unthinkable. ' Stay" -- looking at him searchingly in the merciless summer light. "Why, I declare there is just one wrinkle already. Just one perpendicular wrinkle! That means care, does it not?"

"What care can I have when I have you, except the fear of losing you?"

"Ah, you can have no such fear. I think, like Juliet, ‘I should have had more cunning to be strange. ' I let you see too soon that I adored you. I made myself too cheap."

"No more than the stars are cheap. We may all see them and worship them."

"But that deep perpendicular line, Jack. It must mean something. I have been reading Darwin on Expression, remember."

"Spencer -- Darwin. You are getting far too learned. I liked you better in your ignorance."

"How ignorant I was" -- with a long-drawn sigh -- "till you began to educate me! Poor dear Mütterchen never taught us anything but the multiplication table and a little French grammar. We used to devour Scott, and Dickens, and Bulwer, and Thackeray. The books on our shelves will tell you how they have been read. They have been done to rags with reading. They are dropping to pieces like over-boiled fowls. And we know our Shakespeare -- we have learnt him by heart. We used to make our winter nights merry acting Shakesperean scenes to Nancy and the parlour-maid. They were our only audience. But, except those dear novelists and Shakespeare, we read nothing. History was a blank; philosophy a word without meaning. You introduced me to the world of learned authors."

"Was I wise? Was it not something like Satan's introduction of Eve to the apple?"

"Wise or foolish, you gave me Darwin. And now I want to know what kind of trouble it was that made that line upon your forehead. Some foolish love affair, perhaps. You were in love -- ever so much deeper in love than you are with me."

"No, my dearest. All my earlier loves were lighter than vanity -- no more than Romeo's boyish passion for Rosaline."

"What other care, then? You, who are so rich, can have no money cares."

"Can I not? Imprimis, I am not rich; and then what income I have is derived chiefly from agricultural land cut up into smallish farms, with homesteads, and barns, and cowhouses, that seem always ready to tumble about the tenant's ears, unless I spend half a year's rent in repairs."

"Dear, picturesque old homesteads, I've no doubt."