In the next, you are much younger than I, in more respects than that of years.

Very likely half your ideas on the subject are derived from fictions in which happy results are tacked on to conditions very ill-calculated to produce them--which in real life hardly ever do produce them.

If our friendship were a chapter in a novel, what would be the upshot of it?
Why, I should marry you, or you break your heart at my treachery." Gertrude moved her eyes as if she had some intention of taking to flight.
"But our relations being those of real life--far sweeter, after all--I never dreamed of marrying you, having gained and enjoyed your friendship without that eye to business which our nineteenth century keeps open even whilst it sleeps.

You, being equally disinterested in your regard for me, do not think of breaking your heart, but you are, I suppose, a little hurt at my apparently meditating and resolving on such a serious step as marriage with Agatha without confiding my intention to you.

And you punish me by telling me that you have nothing to do with it--that it is nothing to you.