You see, gentlemen, my condition was growing dangerous. And all of a sudden I felt my heart expanding. I had to talk. I simply had to talk. So I struck my glass madly for silence. "For heaven's sake--keep quiet!" my bride--I beg your pardon, my wife--whispered in my ear. But even if it cost me my life I had to talk. What I said was reported to me afterwards, and if my authorities tell the truth, it was something like the following: "Ladies and gentlemen, I am no longer young. But I do not regret that at all, for maturity also hath its joys. And if anybody were to assert that youth can be happy only when wedded to youth, I would say, 'An infamous lie! I myself am proof of the contrary. For I am no longer young, but I am going to make my young wife happy because my wife is an angel--and I have a loving heart--yea, I swear I have a loving heart, and whoever says that here underneath my waistcoat--there beats no loving heart--to him--I would like to lay bare my heart----'" At this point, according to reports, my words were choked by tears, and in the middle of my abject outpourings I was hustled from the room. * * * * * When I awoke I was lying on a couch much too short for me, with all kinds of fur collars and caps and woollen wraps thrown over me. My neck was strained, my legs numb. I looked around. On a console under a mirror a single candle was burning. Brushes, combs, and boxes of pins lay beside it. On the walls hung a mass of cloaks, hats and all that sort of thing. Oho, the ladies' dressing room! Slowly I became conscious of what had happened. I looked at the clock. Nearly two. Somewhere, as though at a great distance, the playing of a piano and the scraping and sliding of dancing feet in time with the music. _My_ wedding! I combed my hair, arranged my necktie, and heartily wished I might lie right down in my lovely hard camp bed and pull the covers over my ears, instead of--brr! Well, there was nothing to be done about it. So I started for the reception rooms, though without any real feeling of shame, as I was still too sleepy and drowsy to comprehend the state I was in fully. At first nobody noticed me. In the rooms where the gentlemen were sitting the smoke was so thick that at only a few feet away all you could discern was merely the vague outlines of human bodies. A very steep game of cards was under way, and my father-in-law was relieving his guests of their money so neatly that had he had three more daughters to marry off he would have become a rich man. He called it "making wedding expenses." I glanced in at the room where the dancing was going on. The dowagers were fighting off sleep, the young people were hopping about mechanically, while the pianist opened his eyes only when he struck a wrong note. My sister was holding a glass of lemonade on her lap and was inspecting the lemon seeds. It was a doleful sight. Iolanthe nowhere to be seen.