Chapter 12

“A bride who doesn’t see her duty, should be made to see it,” declared Mrs. Sequin to Mrs. Ivy in her most impressive manner. “Something is naturally expected of the wife of John Jay Queerington. I told her expressly that Friday was her day, I even telephoned to remind her, and here it is four o’clock, and people beginning to come, and she off playing tennis!”

They were waiting in the twilight of the Queerington parlor, that plain, stiff, old maid of a parlor that had sprung completely furnished from the brain of a decorator some two decades before and never blinked an eyelid since. It was a room with which no one had ever taken liberties. Hattie had once petulantly remarked that her father would as soon have moved a tooth from his lower to his upper jaw, as to have moved an ornament or picture from the parlor to the second floor.

Mrs. Ivy, the lady addressed, smiled tolerantly. It was one of Mrs. Ivy’s most irritating characteristics that she was always tolerant of other people’s annoyances. She was blond and plump, and wore a modified toga and a crystallized smile.

“Ah! Mrs. Sequin,” she purred, “our little bride is a child of Nature. Sweetness and light! We must not expect too much of her at first. My Gerald says she’s like a wild little waterfall dancing in the sun, undammed by conventions. Gerald phrases things so perfectly.”

“Well, I’ve had enough of trying to manage a waterfall!” Mrs. Sequin said grimly. “Cousin John asked me to take her in hand, and I must say I am finding her difficult. Perfectly sweet and good natured, you know, but she goes right on her own way. She has decided that she likes Connie’s friends better than the Doctor’s, that her hair doesn’t feel right arranged the way it should be, that she isn’t going to wear dresses made by fashionable dressmakers because they are uncomfortable. She actually told me she liked to be a few minutes out of style!”

“But isn’t she right?” murmured Mrs. Ivy. “God has given her a graceful, symmetrical body, shouldn’t she clothe it in flowing robes that do not confine or—”

“For Heaven’s sake, Mrs. Ivy, don’t you dare start her on dress reform! Her one chance for social success is her beauty. She simply terrifies me the way she says right out the first thing that comes into her mind. It will take me months to teach her the first lesson in society, that the most immodest thing in the world is the naked truth.”

“What I hope to rouse in the dear girl,” said Mrs. Ivy with a superior smile, “is a sense of responsibility toward her fellowmen. I have already proposed her name for the Anti-Tobacco League and Miss Snell, our corresponding secretary of the Foreign Missionary Society, has promised to meet me here at five. It is these young, ardent souls that must take up the banner of reform when it drops from the hands of us veterans.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Sequin, turning a handsome, bored profile to her companion, “I shall never get over the absurdity of the marriage!”

“Ah!” said Mrs. Ivy, laying a plump white hand on Mrs. Sequin’s arm, “cosmic forces brought them together! The thing we seek is seeking us. She was young, inexperienced, adrift in the world; he was ill, lonely, and with three motherless children. She told me that through the past year, the Doctor’s letters were all that sustained her.”

“Of course they did! Cousin John’s letters sustain everybody. Especially if you haven’t heard his lectures. Of course he does repeat himself.”

“As for her youth,” went on Mrs. Ivy. “What if she is a mere rosebud as yet? She’ll unfold; we’ll help her to unfold, you and I, won’t we?”

Meanwhile the bride had slipped in the side entrance and was making frantic haste in the room above to exchange a tennis costume for a new house-dress.

Connie Queerington was assisting, but Connie’s assistance was generally a hindrance. She was an exceedingly voluble, blond young person, with blue eyes that enjoyed nothing more than their own reflection.

“I’ll never get it hooked if you don’t hold still,” she was saying. “Every time you laugh you pop it open.”

“Fifteen—love, thirty—love, forty—love, game!” rehearsed Miss Lady, practising a newly acquired serve with a vigorous stroke of her racket. “I could play all day and all night! Do you think I’ll ever get to be a good player?”

“Of course, if you just won’t get so excited and hit the balls before they bounce. Gerald Ivy says your overhand play is great. He’s mad about you, anyhow. I’d give both my little fingers to have him look at me as he did at you to-day.”

“Silly!” laughed Miss Lady. “There goes the button off my slipper. Do you suppose any one will notice if I pin the strap?”

“Nobody but Myrtella. Sit on your foot if she comes around. If you don’t hurry Cousin Katherine will have nervous prostration.”

“I don’t see why you have to treat reception day like judgment day,” complained Miss Lady. “Who else is down stairs?”

“Only Mrs. Ivy now. She is the one who held your hand and called you a sunbeam. Gerald’s mother, you know. Hat can’t abide her; says she’s a pussy-cat. Of course Mr. Gooch will be here for supper.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Gooch.”

“A friend of the Doctor’s?”

“No, indeed. He isn’t anybody’s friend. He bores us all to extinction.”

“Well, what’s he coming for?”

“I don’t know. He always comes on Friday. He came in here once to get out of the rain, and Mother asked him to stay to tea. That was ten years ago and he has been back nearly every Friday since.”

“Do you have company like this all the time?” asked Miss Lady somewhat breathlessly.

“This is nothing!” exclaimed Connie dramatically. “Before Myrtella came I never knew what it was to sleep in my own bed, and I had to eat the legs of chickens until I felt like a centipede. There! You are all right; come along. Don’t forget to tell Father about the party!”

Miss Lady had been married two weeks, but she was still circling wildly in a vortex of new experiences that excited and bewildered her. Through a long, lonely winter she had fought out her problems at the little country school, relying implicitly upon Doctor Queerington’s friendship and guidance. His weekly letters, couched in paragraphs of technical perfection, seemed to her oracles of wisdom and beauty. Then the amazing and unbelievable thing had happened! He, the great Doctor Queerington, her father’s friend, her friend, the man whom she respected more than any one else in the world, had chosen her, a young, inexperienced girl to be his wife!