Sir, – The anomaly of the odd number of people getting married (July 7th and 8th) has a parallel in one of our best-known poems. In The Wild Swans at CooleWB Yeats describes himself looking enviously at the swans who have paired off companionably, "lover by lover". But he has already told us, quite specifically, that there are 59 swans, which must mean that either at least one is a solitary, or else there is a "swan-age à trois".
Alternatively, Yeats’s arithmetic was as unreliable as his spelling. – Yours, etc,