"Can't you see that there's nothing extraordinary about the circumstances except this wonderful ship?
I have told you how Pop and I met Lord Redgrave in our tour through the Canadian Rockies two or three years ago.

No, it's two years and nine months next June; and how he took an interest in Pop's theories and ideas about this same ship that we are on now----" "Oh yes," said Mrs.Van Stuyler rather acidly, "and not only in the abstract ideas, but apparently in a certain concrete reality." "Mrs.Van," laughed Zaidie, with a cunning twist on her heel, "I know you don't mean to be rude, but--well, now did any one ever call _you_ a concrete reality?
Of course it's correct just as a scientific definition, perhaps--still, anyhow, I guess it's not much good going on about that.

The facts are just this way.

I consented to marry that Byfleet marquis just out of sheer spite and blank ignorance.

Lord Redgrave never actually asked me to marry him when we were in the Rockies, but he did say when he went back to England that as soon as he had realised my father's ideal he would come over and try and realise one of his own.