I Forbid the Banns! — page 28: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

CHAPTER IV. ON ITALIAN PROVERBS. HE passengers on the deck of the Carnarvon Castle were alert. Here at last was a Topic. With a topic life aboard an ocean liner assumes a freshness which passen- gers have long ceased to associate with life. It is the absence of a topic that causes so much nonsense to be talked on the ocean. It is a certain rule of life that when a man has exhausted every available topic of conversation with a woman, he tells her that he loves her. Sometimes, when the woman is unmarried, he asks her to marry him. It is the instinct of The Male, evolutionists tell us. He feels that he must make himself interesting to The Other. He tries to do so, and probably succeeds so long as a topic remains. When the last is exhausted he is in despair. It is then that his instinct tells him that by assuring her that he loves her he succeeds in making himself quite interesting in her eyes. The accidental shipment of a man suffering from an hereditary disease known as Delirium Tremens prevented the passengers aboard a steamer in which I once took a voyage from feeling solitary. He had a trick of creeping out of his berth with a knife at nights that was extremely enlivening. We hadaclever young surgeon aboard, and he cured the man. Before we reached land we had all proposed to one another. The passengers aboard the Carnarvon Castle perceived in a moment that a Topic had at last come to them. Even if no more harm had occurred than the bursting of a steam 18 (EORMIELICOYOLKS (E(0)