CHAPTER XXVI.
THE GLAMOUR FADES.
After all, the rosy love-making and marrying and Epithalamy are no
more than the dawn of things, and to follow comes all the spacious
interval of white laborious light. Try as we may to stay those
delightful moments, they fade and pass remorselessly; there is no
returning, no recovering, only--for the foolish--the vilest peep-shows
and imitations in dens and darkened rooms. We go on--we grow. At least
we age. Our young couple, emerging presently from an atmosphere of
dusk and morning stars, found the sky gathering greyly overhead and
saw one another for the first time clearly in the light of every-day.
It might perhaps witness better to Lewisham's refinement if one could
tell only of a moderated and dignified cooling, of pathetic little
concealments of disappointment and a decent maintenance of the
sentimental atmosphere. And so at last daylight. But our young couple
were too crude for that. The first intimations of their lack of
identity have already been described, but it would be tedious and
pitiful to tell of all the little intensifications, shade by shade, of
the conflict of their individualities. They fell out, dear lady! they
came to conflict of words. The stress of perpetual worry was upon
them, of dwindling funds and the anxious search for work that would
not come.
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