‘Now, Gundred, for instance--very often with her I have a shut-out feeling of getting no further, of finding locked doors and stone walls. Sometimes I have nothing that I want to say to her, and sometimes she has nothing that she wants to say to me. Sometimes she does not understand what I mean, sometimes we seem to be talking different languages, without any real wish to make ourselves intelligible. When we have said that we love each other there is nothing much left for us to say. And isn’t that exactly as it should be? The love is the only thing that matters, after all. One does not marry for the conversation, but for the love. Other people can give one the conversation. No; one has to look forward over the whole field of life--it is not only the present amusement that matters. What is very amusing and delightful for half an hour would be quite intolerable to put up with for fifty years of marriage life. _Marrons glacés_ and caviare sandwiches are excellent in their way, but, when everything is said and done, bread is the real staple of existence. The primitive passionate lover is trying to make half an hour’s surfeit of sweets and savouries supply the place of all healthy meals through all the years to come; it is only the idealist who sets himself calmly down to a long indefinite course of bread-and-butter. There can be no doubt that the bread-and-butter regime is the saner and the more blessed and the more refined of the two. But, of course, if one simply lives from hand to mouth and from hour to hour, the bread-and-butter scheme _is_ apt to look a little dull by comparison with frequent snacks of indigestible, exciting dainties. However, thank Heaven, I have got what is best for me--and sense enough to recognise the fact. If Gundred sometimes fails to feed me up with pretty fancies from hour to hour, she is laying up for me a supply of satisfying bread-and-butter for the rest of our lives. And one’s whole life is obviously more important than any given half-hour of it.’ ‘Yes,’ replied Lady Adela after a pause, ‘but one must be careful about bread-and-butter. Too much is apt to make one stout. I quite agree with dear Gundred, though, as to plain food being the most satisfactory in the long run. I read the other day a very nice book, in which the characters sat down to “a plain but perfectly-cooked meal.” Now, that struck me as expressing so exactly what one wants.’ ‘My dear,’ said her son abruptly, ‘what did my father and you talk about when you were engaged?’ Lady Adela, who had expected from her son the soothing accompaniment of another monologue to the music of her knitting, started at his abrupt question, lost count of her stitches, then looked vaguely up at last, her lips moving in a vain effort to recover her place in the row. ‘What did we talk about?’ she repeated. Then she blushed faintly. The distant past was transfigured with romance.