An hour later, however, when Maurice returned, she was serene again. Love had closed the door—bolted it! barred it! and the gray landscape of dividing years was forgotten. And as her face had cleared, so had his. He had explained her annoyance by calling himself a clod! "She hated not to be thought married—of course!" What a brute he was not to have recognized the subtle loveliness of a sensitiveness like that! He wanted to tell her so, but he could only push the newspaper toward her and slip his hand under it to feel for hers—which he clutched and gripped so hard that her rings cut into the flesh. She laughed, and opened her pocketbook and showed him the little circle of grass which he had slipped over her wedding ring after fifty-four minutes of married life. At which his whole face radiated. It was as if, through those gay blue eyes of his, he poured pure joy from his heart into hers.
"Be careful," he threatened: "one minute more, and I'll kiss you right here, before people!"
She snapped her purse shut in pretended terror, but after that they held hands under the newspaper, and were perfectly happy—until the moment came of meeting the Houghtons on the platform at the junction; then happiness gave way to embarrassment.
Henry Houghton, obliged to throw away a half-smoked cigar, and, saying under his breath that he wished he was asleep, was cross; but his wife was pleasantly commonplace. She kissed the bride, and the groom, too, and said that Edith was in a great state of excitement about them! Then she condoled with Eleanor about the heat, and told Maurice there were cinders on his hat. But not even her careful matter-of-courseness could make the moment anything but awkward. In the four-mile drive to Green Hill—during which Eleanor said she hoped old Lion wouldn't run away;—the young husband seemed to grow younger and younger; and his wife, in her effort to talk to Mr. Houghton, seemed to grow older and older. …
"If I didn't happen to know she was a fool," Henry Houghton said to his Mary, washing his hands before going down to supper, "I should think she was quite a nice woman—she's so good looking."
"Henry! At your time of life, are you deciding a woman's 'niceness' by her looks?"
"But tell her she mustn't bore him," he said, ignoring the rebuke. "Tell her that when it comes to wives, every husband on earth is Mr. F.'s aunt—he 'hates a fool'!"
"Why not tell her yourself?" she said: then she sighed; "why did she do it?"
"She did it," he instructed her, "because the flattery of a boy's lovemaking went to her head. I have an idea that she was hungry for happiness—so it was champagne on an empty stomach. Think of the starvation dullness of living with that Newbolt female, who drops her g's all over the floor! Edith likes her," he added.
"Oh, Edith!" said Edith's mother, with a shrug; "well; if you can explain Eleanor, perhaps you can explain Maurice?"
"That's easy; anything in petticoats will answer as a peg for a man (we are the idealizing sex) to hang his heart on. Then, there's her music—and her pathos. For she is pathetic, Kit?"
But Mary Houghton shook her head: "It is Maurice who is pathetic—my poor Maurice! … "
When they went down to the east porch, with its great white columns, and its broad steps leading into Mrs. Houghton's gay and fragrant garden, they found Edith there before them—sitting on the top step, her arms around her knees, her worshiping eyes fixed on the Bride. Edith had nothing to say; it was enough to look at the "bridal couple," as the kitchen had named them. When her father and mother appeared, she did manage, in the momentary bustle of rising and offering chairs, to say to Maurice:
"Oh, isn't she lovely! Oh, Maurice, let's go out behind the barn after supper and talk! Maurice, did she bring her harp? I want to see her play on it! I saw her wedding ring," she ended, in an ecstatic whisper.
"She doesn't play on the harp; she plays on the piano. Did you twig her hair?" Maurice whispered back; "it's like black down!"
Edith was speechless with adoration; she wished, passionately, that Maurice would put his coat down for the Bride to step on, like Sir Walter Raleigh! "for she is a Queen!" Edith thought: then Maurice pulled one of her pigtails and she kicked him—and after that she was forgotten, for the grown people began to talk, and say it had been a hot day, and that the strawberries needed rain—but Eleanor hoped there wouldn't be a thunderstorm.
"They have to say things, I suppose," Edith reflected, patiently: "but after supper, Maurice and I will talk." So she bore with her father and mother, who certainly tried to be conversational. The Bride, Edith noticed, was rather silent, and Maurice, though grown up to the extent of being married, hadn't much to say—but once he winked at Edith and again tried to pull her hair—so she knew that he, also, was patient. She was too absorbed to return the wink. She just stared at Eleanor. She only dared to speak to her once; then, breathlessly: "I—I'm going to go to your school, when I'm sixteen." It was as if she looked forward to a pilgrimage to a shrine! It was impossible not to see the worship in her face; Eleanor saw her smile made Edith almost choke with bliss. But, like herself, the Bride had nothing to say. Eleanor just sat in sweet, empty silence, and watched Maurice, twisting old Rover's ears, and answering Mrs. Houghton's maternal questions about his winter underclothing and moths; she caught that wink at Edith, and the occasional broad grin when Mrs. Houghton scolded him for some carelessness, and the ridiculous gesture of tearing his hair when she said he was a scamp to have forgotten this or that. Looking at the careless youth of him, she laughed to herself for sheer joy in the beauty of it!
But Edith's plan for barn conversation with Maurice fell through, because after supper, with an air of complete self-justification, he said to his hosts, "Now you must hear Eleanor sing!"
At which she protested, "Oh, Maurice, no!"
The Houghtons, however, were polite; so they all went into the studio, and, standing in the twilight, with Maurice playing her accompaniment, she sang, very simply, and with quite poignant beauty, the song of "Golden Numbers," with its serene refrain:
"O sweet, O sweet content!"
"Lovely, my dear," Mrs. Houghton said, and Maurice was radiant.
"Is Mr. F. your father?" Edith said, timidly; and while Eleanor was giving her maiden name, Edith's terrified father said, in a ferocious aside, "Mary! Kill that child!" Late that night he told his wife she really must do something about Edith: "Fortunately, Eleanor is as ignorant of Dickens as of 'most everything else. I bet she never read Little Dorrit. But, for God's sake, muzzle that daughter of yours! … Mary, you see how he was caught?—the woman's voice."
"Don't call her 'the woman'!"
"Well, vampire. Kit, what do you make of her?"
"I wish I knew what to make of her! I feel sure she is really and truly good. But, oh, Henry, she's so mortal dull! She hasn't a spark of humor in her."
"'Course not. If she had, she wouldn't have married him. But he has humor! Better warn her that a short cut to matrimonial unhappiness is not to have the same taste in jokes! Mary, maybe, her music will hold him?"
"Maybe," said Mary Houghton, sighing.
"'Consider the stars,'" he quoted, sarcastically; but she took the sting out of his gibe by saying, very simply:
"Yes, I try to."
"He is good stuff," her husband said; "straight as a string! When he came into the studio to talk things over he was as sober as if he were fifty, and hadn't made an ass of himself. He took up the income question in a surprisingly businesslike way; then he said that of course he knew I didn't like it—his giving up college and flying off the handle, and getting married without saying anything to me. 'But,' he said, 'Eleanor's