"I don't agree with you," I replied, "either about you being too old or the times being too stirring. We live in great times, and there are still greater ones coming." Isabel shook her head. "I dare say: but they'll smell awfully of machinery. The world is growing far too mechanical and scientific, and is always inventing new diseases and fresh sources of danger. I wish I'd lived before aeroplanes and pyorrhoea were invented! Nobody ever heard of such things when I was a girl." "I envy the people who are young nowadays," I admitted, with a sigh. "Good gracious, Reggie, I don't! I pity them because they never knew the glories of the 'eighties and the 'nineties: those dear old frivolous, uneventful days, when everybody thought that the last word had been said about everything, and that a further extension of the franchise was the only weapon still left in Fate's armoury: when we fondly believed that wars had died with the Napoleons, and invasions had gone out of fashion with the curfew-bell and William the Conqueror. Yet as soon as the sky grew pink with dawn of a new century, that tiresome South African War began: and now scaremongers introduce an invasion of England into the realm of practical politics!" "But there were wars even in those days," I argued. "Yes; but only 'old, unhappy, far-off things,' that confined themselves to the newspapers. We never knew the real taste of war--at least, I didn't--until the South African tragedy: and now everybody seems to think there'll be a great European War before very long, with us in the thick of it, and the German Emperor trying to be William the Conqueror the Second. Oh, Reggie, don't you wish we could go back to the dear old comfortable, self-satisfied 'eighties?" "Certainly not: I wouldn't do so for worlds. My wife wasn't born in those days, and I should hate to miss her." "Dear me, how procrastinating of her! She made a mistake to put things off for so long. But I don't mind giving up the 'eighties for the sake of you and your unborn wife, and only going back as far as the 'nineties. As a matter of fact, the 'nineties were even jollier than the 'eighties, and had a fuller flavour." I shook my head. "No: Fay was only a child in the 'nineties, and I want her as a woman. Besides, I didn't know of her existence then." "Then if you didn't know of her existence you couldn't mind missing her. But have it your own way. Revel in your seething young century as much as you like, but leave me my beloved Nineteenth. I was what used to be called _fin de siècle_ in those days, and a jolly nice thing it was to be!" "It is strange how there always do seem to be wars and tumults and things of that kind at the beginning of a century," I said; "as if centuries experienced the symptoms of youth and age, as we do."