Archibald preferred it
because being in the same room as Mrs Milsom always made him feel like
a murderer with particularly large feet; and Margaret preferred it
because, as she told Archibald, these secret meetings lent a touch of
poetry to what might otherwise have been a commonplace engagement.
Archibald thought this charming; but at the same time he could not
conceal from himself the fact that Margaret's passion for the poetic
cut, so to speak, both ways. He admired and loved the loftiness of her
soul, but, on the other hand, it was a tough job having to live up to
it. For Archibald was a very ordinary young man. They had tried to
inoculate him with a love of poetry at school, but it had not taken.
Until he was thirty he had been satisfied to class all poetry (except
that of Mr George Cohan) under the general heading of punk. Then he met
Margaret, and the trouble began. On the day he first met her, at a
picnic, she had looked so soulful, so aloof from this world, that he
had felt instinctively that here was a girl who expected more from a
man than a mere statement that the weather was great. It so chanced
that he knew just one quotation from the classics, to wit, Tennyson's
critique of the Island-Valley of Avilion. He knew this because he had
had the passage to write out one hundred and fifty times at school, on
the occasion of his being caught smoking by one of the faculty who
happened to be a passionate admirer of the 'Idylls of the King'.
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