we were un-American, we were thrown very much into the society
of the nicer English. Paris, you see, was our home. Somewhere
between Nice and Bordighera provided yearly winter quarters for
us, and Nauheim always received us from July to September. You
will gather from this statement that one of us had, as the saying is,
a "heart", and, from the statement that my wife is dead, that she
was the sufferer.

Captain Ashburnham also had a heart. But, whereas a yearly
month or so at Nauheim tuned him up to exactly the right pitch for
the rest of the twelvemonth, the two months or so were only just
enough to keep poor Florence alive from year to year. The reason
for his heart was, approximately, polo, or too much hard
sportsmanship in his youth. The reason for poor Florence's broken
years was a storm at sea upon our first crossing to Europe, and the
immediate reasons for our imprisonment in that continent were
doctor's orders. They said that even the short Channel crossing
might well kill the poor thing.

When we all first met, Captain Ashburnham, home on sick leave
from an India to which he was never to return, was thirty-three;
Mrs Ashburnham Leonora --was thirty-one. I was thirty-six and
poor Florence thirty. Thus today Florence would have been
thirty-nine and Captain Ashburnham forty-two; whereas I am
forty-five and Leonora forty. You will perceive, therefore, that our
friendship has been a young-middle-aged affair, since we were all
of us of quite quiet dispositions, the Ashburnhams being more
particularly what in England it is the custom to call "quite good
people".