But then, after all, she will be my wife, and because she is pretty and “strange”—I fancy that’s what Lou will call her—she may succeed in a society which, like the Athenians, is always running after some new thing. The latest “craze” is to my mind like a glass of sherbet. It creates the greatest amount of stir for the least space of time.
Not even thoughts of Lou, who is the pink of propriety—why isn’t impropriety dubbed pink?—can terrify me from my purpose, because I am in love. I never felt so unafraid of Lou, her tongue and her smile, in all my life, even at the distance of many thousand miles, and I conclude therefrom that I must be terribly in earnest. As for the others, I don’t care.
They have pleased themselves, have married as they wished, and surely may be reasonably expected to let me do the same, I argue.
