ROMANTIC MARRIAGES.

Waikato Times, Volume 108, Issue 18164, 31 October 1930, Page 5

ROMANTIC MARRIAGES.

AND THEIR ORIGINS. Husbands and wives have been set thinking of their first meeting by a lonely girl’s letter, published recently in a London women’s paper. ’She laments her uncongenial singleness, and asks in w-hat 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 Dubin zoo. They found themselyes together at a lion's cage, and their casual conversation that ensued by 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 were. I expect he was too grandly dreamy to go in fancy dress at all.” Mrs Thomas Hardy was her late husband’s secretary before -she was his wifQ. 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 who can work amicably and well together Jhave 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 dog Tight—anything in the world may be the 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.