He stood in the hallway of the West Strand Registry Office, tugging at his rough, woollen jacket. Beside him stood Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a woman of formidable intellect and even more formidable patience. She was dressed sensibly; George was dressed, as usual, like a hedge that had decided to take up socialist lecturing.
Charlotte laughed, pulling him toward the carriage. "Only five thousand, George? You’re getting soft in your old age."
"You look remarkably like a prisoner waiting for the gaoler, George," Charlotte remarked, her eyes twinkling behind her spectacles. Getting Married by George Bernard Shaw
"I am merely contemplating the absurdity of the contract," Shaw retorted, his red beard bristling. "To promise to love, honor, and obey is a biological impossibility and a legal farce. One might as well promise to keep one’s hair the same color for fifty years." "And yet, here you are," she said.
The morning of his wedding, George Bernard Shaw did not look like a man about to enter the "monstrous engine" of matrimony. Instead, he looked like a man who had misplaced a very important pamphlet on Fabianism. He stood in the hallway of the West
"Well, Mr. Shaw? Do you feel like a changed man? A pillar of the establishment?"
As they stepped back out onto the street, the London fog swirling around them, Charlotte took his arm. Charlotte laughed, pulling him toward the carriage
"Here I am," he sighed. "A victim of my own exhaustion. I have worked myself into a state of physical collapse, and you, Charlotte, are the only person with the efficiency to see that I am properly buried or properly fed. Since I am not yet ready for the former, I suppose we must proceed with the latter via this legal ritual."