ROMANTIC MARRIAGES

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 73, Issue 346, 18 August 1930, Page 8

ROMANTIC MARRIAGES

SOME STRANGE ORIGINS “WE MET AT THE ZOO” Husbands and wives have bfcen set thinking of their first meeting by a lonely girl's letter, published recently in London, in the Daily Express. She laments her uncongenial singleness, and asks in what magic circumstances lovers first meet. There is no place, it seems, and no golden rule. Romance has been discovered at the dullest dinner party, or on the top of an omnibus on a wet night. Miss Sybil Thorndike, for instance, first met her husband, Mr Lewis Casson, at the Dublin Zoo. They found themselves together at a lion’s cage, and their casual conversation that ensued by a mere chance was the beginning of a romance that ended in the happiest of marriages. Lady Tree first saw the great actor who was to be her husband, the late Sir Herbert Tree, at a fancy dress ball. “It is so long ago,” she said in telling the story, “that I remember little about it except that it was our first meeting. I don’t remember even where it was, or what we both wore., I expect he was too grandly dreamy to have remembered to go in fancy dress at all.”

Mrs Thomas Hardy was her late husband’s secretary before she was his wife. Theirs was one of the numberless marriages that are the result of a business relationship. This kind of marriage is often the happiest. A man and woman w’ho can work amicably and well together have a good chance of making a successful home. But the most romantic marriages of all are those that are the outcome of pure chance. A meeting in. a train, some courtesy extended to a stranger in a difficulty, a storm of rain, a dogfight—anything in the world may be tho occasion of the first meeting. There is no need for the girl who has no brothers and few friends to believe romance can never come her way. It will meet her where she least expects to find it.