Osborne, let
us, I pray you, glance with reverent eyes, and a smile not mocking but
tender, at certain other weddings which furtively cross our path.
Weddings between elderly persons, hitherto unable to make up their mind,
or having, perchance, made it up all wrong on a first occasion;
inveterate old maids and bachelors, or widowers who thought to mourn for
ever; people who have found their heart perhaps a little late in the
day; but, who knows? shrivelled as it is, perhaps, but the mellower, and
of more enduring, more essential sweetness.

Alongside of such tardy nuptials there is a corresponding class of
_marriages of true minds_. Genuine ones are exceedingly rare during
youth; and the impediments, despite the opinion of Shakespeare, are of
the nature of nullity, ending most often in unseemly divorce between
Hermia and Helena, or the Kings of Sicilia and Bohemia, one of whom, if
you remember, tried to poison the other on very small provocation. The
last-named is an instructive example of the hollowness of nursery or
playground friendship, or rather of what passes for such. Genuine
friendship is an addition to our real self, a revelation of new
possibilities; and young people, busily absorbing the traditions of the
past and the fashions of the day, have very rarely got a real self to
reveal or to bestow. So that the feeling we experience in later life
towards our playmates is, in fact, rather a wistful pleasure in the
thought of our own past than any real satisfaction in their present
selves.

Be this as it may, there is among the compensations of life, a kind of
friendship which, by its very nature, requires that one of the friends
have passed the _middle of the way_. I am not referring to the joys of
grandfather and grandmotherhood, and all that "_art d'etre grandpere_"
which have been written and sung until one turns a trifle sceptical
about them. What I allude to has, on the contrary, escaped (almost
entirely, I think) the desecrating pen of the analytical or moralizing
novelist, and remains one of the half-veiled mysteries of human good
fortune, before which the observer passes quickly in shy admiration.
The case is this: one of the parents has been unwilling, or
disappointed; marriage has meant emptiness, or worse; and a nursery full
of children has been, very likely, a mere occasion for ill-will and
painful struggle. The poor soul has been, perhaps for years, fretted and
wearied; or else woefully lonely, cabin