They felt for each other, she decided, the thing called “love.” It was not, perhaps, the romance which one found in books. But she had been taught carefully at college to distrust romance. The emphasis had been laid on the transient quality of adolescent emotion. One married for the sake of the race, and one chose, quite logically, with one’s head instead, as in the old days, with the heart.
So there you had it. Delafield was eligible. He was healthy, had brains enough, an acceptable code of morals—and was willing to let her have her own way. If there were moments when Edith wondered if this program was adequate to wedded bliss, she put the thought aside. She and Delafield liked each other no end. Why worry?
And really at times Uncle Fred was impossible. His mother had lived until he was thirty-five, she had adored him, and had passed on to Cousin Annabel and to the old servants in the house the formula by which she had made her son happy. Her one fear had been that he might marry. He was extremely popular, much sought after. But he had kept his heart at home. His sweetheart, he had often said, was silver-haired and over sixty. He basked in her approbation; was soothed and sustained by it.
Then she had died, and Edith had come, and things had been different.
The difference had been demonstrated in a dozen ways. Edith was pleasantly affectionate, but she didn’t yield an inch. “Dear Uncle Fred,” she would ask, when they disagreed on matters of manners or morals, or art or athletics, or religion or the lack of it, “isn’t my opinion as good as yours?”
“Apparently my opinion isn’t worth anything.”
“Oh, yes it is—but you must let me have mine.”
Her independence met his rules and broke them. Her frankness of speech came up against his polite reticences and they both said things.
Frederick, of course, blamed Edith when she made him forget his manners. They had, he held, been considered perfect. Edith retorted that they had, perhaps, never been challenged. “It is easy enough, of course, when everybody gives in to you.”
She had brought into his house an atmosphere of modernity which appalled him. She went and came as she pleased, would not be bound by old standards.
“Oh, Uncle Fred,” she would say when he protested, “the war changed things. Women of to-day aren’t sheep.”
“The women of our family,” her uncle would begin, to be stopped by the scornful retort, “Why do you want the women of your family to be different from the others you go with?”
She had him there. His sophistication matched that of the others of his set. Socially he was neither a Puritan nor a Pharisee. It was only under his own roof that he became patriarchal.
Yet, as time went on, he learned that Edith’s faults were tempered by her fastidiousness. She did not confuse liberty and license. She neither smoked nor drank. There was about her dancing a fine and stately quality which saved it from sensuousness. Yet when he told her things, there was always that irritating shrug of the shoulders. “Oh, well, I’m not a rowdy—you know that. But I like to play around.”
His pride in her grew—in her burnished hair, the burning blue of her eyes, her great beauty, the fineness of her spirit, the integrity of her character.
Yet he sighed with relief when she told him of her engagement to Delafield Simms. He loved her, but none the less he felt the strain of her presence in his establishment. It would be like sinking back into the luxury of a feather bed, to take up the old life where she had entered it.
And Edith, too, welcomed her emancipation. “When I marry you,” she told Delafield, “I am going to break all the rules. In Uncle Fred’s house everything runs by clockwork, and it is he who winds the clock.”
Delafield laughed and kissed her. He was like the rest of the men of his generation, apparently acquiescent. Yet the chances were that when Edith was his wife, he, too, would wind the clock!
Their engagement was one of mutual freedom. Edith did as she pleased, Delafield did as he pleased. They rarely clashed. And as the wedding day approached, they were pleasantly complacent.
Delafield, dictating a letter one day to Frederick Towne’s stenographer, spoke of his complacency. He was writing to Bob Sterling, who was to be his best man, and who shared his apartment in New York. Delafield was an orphan, and had big money interests. He felt that Washington was tame compared to the metropolis. He and Edith were to live one block east of Fifth Avenue, in a house that he had bought for her.
When he was in Washington he occupied a desk in Frederick’s office. Lucy Logan took his dictation. She had been for several years with Towne. She was twenty-three, well-groomed, and self-possessed. She had slender, flexible fingers, and Delafield liked to look at them. She had soft brown hair, and her profile, as she bent over her book, was clear-cut and composed.
“Edith and I are great pals,” he dictated. “I rather think we are going to hit it off famously. I’d hate to have a woman hang around my neck. And I want you for my best man. I know it is asking a lot, but it’s just once in a lifetime, old chap.”
Lucy wrote that and waited with her pencil poised.
“That’s about all,” said Delafield.
Lucy shut up her book and rose.
“Wait a minute,” Delafield decided. “I want to add a postscript.”
Lucy sat down.
“By the way,” Delafield dictated, “I wish you’d order the flowers at Tolley’s. White orchids for Edith of course. He’ll know the right thing for the bridesmaids—I’ll get Edith to send him the color scheme——”
Lucy’s pencil dashed and dotted. She looked up, hesitated. “Miss Towne doesn’t care for orchids.”
“How do you know?” he demanded.
She fluttered the leaves of her notebook and found an order from Towne to a local florist. “He says here, ‘Anything but orchids—she doesn’t like them.’ ”
“But I’ve been sending her orchids every week.”
“Perhaps she didn’t want to tell you——”
“And you think I should have something else for the wedding bouquet?”
“I think she might like it better.” There was a faint flush on her cheek.
“What would you suggest?”
“I can’t be sure what Miss Towne would like.”
“What would you like?” intently.
She considered it seriously—her slender fingers clasped on her book. “I think,” she told him, finally, “that if I were going to marry a man I should want what he wanted.”
He laughed and leaned forward. “Good heavens, are there any women like that left in the world?”
Her flush deepened, she rose and went towards the door. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything.”
His voice changed. “Indeed, I am glad you did.” He had risen and now held the door open for her. “We men are stupid creatures. I should never have found it out for myself.”
She went away, and he sat there thinking about her. Her impersonal manner had always been perfect, and he had found her little flush charming.
It was because of Lucy Logan, therefore, that Edith had white violets instead of orchids in her wedding bouquet. And it was because, too, of Lucy Logan, that other things happened. Three of Edith’s bridesmaids were house-guests. Their names were Rosalind, Helen and Margaret. They had, of course, last names, but these have nothing to do with the story. They had been Edith’s classmates at college, and she had been somewhat democratic in her selection of them.
“They