She wanted to talk to him, to say clever things to make him laugh, as Alice and Emily had. He had been with those two all afternoon—and tomorrow he would be gone forever. But she wasn’t good at beginning conversations, and she never knew where to look when his dark eyes were on her; so she kept at a little distance, turning her head away, pretending to be busy.
“Here’s another ball!” he called, picking it up out of the wet pink and silver border of cinnamon pinks. And he said it as if he were telling her a tremendous and beautiful and funny secret that only they two would ever know, so that she forgot to be shy, and came smiling to his side.
In her spreading white muslin and rose-colored ribbons, she seemed to him like a slender apple-tree in blossom. He was a modern young man, but he did not like the modern girl. It was the time of the bloomer agitation, and every paper you picked up was full of caricatures of ladies, with bonnets and ringlets, to be sure, but also with trousers, bull dogs, and cigars. And there were jokes about ladies “popping the question,” or if they did not ask for the gentleman’s hand in marriage, at least asking for the next polka or deux temps. There were even jokes about colleges for women, and caricatures of professors with bloomers under their gowns and mortarboards on top of their lace caps. But there was nothing of the new woman about Margaret. She no more wanted equal rights than did the rose, sweet and cool in its broad fresh leaves at her belt. At the very mention of bloomers her white lids curtained her blue eyes, her cheeks grew pinker; and, when she went to church to confess her sins in her innocent voice, she wore a bonnet all rosebuds and lace instead of one of those fast round hats that were becoming so fashionable.
“See, here’s a firefly,” he said, and showed it to her on his finger, its little green glow shining and darkening, shining and darkening. She bent over it, showers of ringlets falling like curtains on either side of her pretty face. The dusky rose in the sky was deepening, and little pale moths were fluttering over the flowers. In the valley below them where a white mist was rising, the frogs began to call. They still stood close together, their heads bent to the firefly’s small green lamp; but they had forgotten it, forgotten everything except that her whole being was crying silently, “Tomorrow we will be apart!” and his was answering, “Tonight we are together.”
The night before her wedding Margaret spent in weeping. In the first place, the Southmayds were dreadfully poor, and, instead of lace, her wedding-veil beneath its orange buds would be plain illusion. And then Mrs. Southmayd had had “a little talk” with her daughter that was as terrifying as it was unilluminating; and, after vague wide circlings about some secret so sinister that it could not be mentioned, it had ended in floods of tears on both sides.
Her trembling voice and ice-cold fingers, when they were being married, filled Victor with an anguish of love. But presently, tying on her white silk going-away bonnet, an artless advertisement with its lace veil and orange-blossoms, while her bridesmaids fluttered about her, envious and excited, and her tall, dark lover waited for her below, she grew more calm, became, in fact, complacent. And although his passionate love never seemed to her “quite nice,” she returned it with placid affection.
He had fallen in love with her greatly because she was not “strong-minded”; and indeed Margaret was never what Miss Florence Nightingale called “a female ink-bottle.” But, after they were married, he tried for a little while to improve her mind.
“Would you like me to read to you, darling?”
“Oh, that would be very nice!”
But first she would have to get her footstool, and her work from upstairs, and her little quilted jacket of rose-colored silk bordered with swansdown, in case she grew chilly. And then:
“Oh, Victor! My thimble! It’s up on my toilet table!”
And she would look so helpless and appealing that he would tear upstairs, three steps at a time, and bring it down to her.
“Now then, I really am ready!”
He would begin to read words that stirred the depths of his heart with their beauty:
“ ‘Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night,
And watching—’ ”
“Oh, Victor love! Before you get really into it! Tell me, if you were me, would you have field flowers on your new leghorn straw, or just a white lace veil and mauve ribbons? Field flowers and a lace veil would be too much, wouldn’t they? Or wouldn’t they?”
“ ‘No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft fall and swell,
Awake forever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.’ ”
Surely she must cry “It’s about us. It’s just exactly like us!”
She hadn’t listened to a word. The fire was so bright, her chair was so soft, and the sound of the rain on the windows made her sleepy. But when his voice stopped she rose out of her warm abstraction to make a little humming sound that meant, “How very pretty.”
“Did you like it, my darling?”
“Yes, thank you, Victor. It was sweetly pretty. Oh, and just while I remember it—would you like a tipsy parson for dessert tomorrow? You hardly touched your syllabub today, and I do so want to please you!”
It seemed to him so touching that she should want to please him that he could have fallen at her feet to worship her. But he gave up trying to improve her mind.
He gave up trying to make her exercise her body even sooner, although on their honeymoon he had bullied and coaxed her
