f I
don't like it, I'm not going to live with him."

"Not live with your husband! Why, Lucy!"

"It's perfectly absurd to think I'll have to live with a man if I find I
don't love him. Ask Jenny if it isn't."

Ask Jenny! This was her incredible suggestion! This was her reverence
for authority, for duty, for the thundering admonitions of Saint Paul!
As far as Saint Paul was concerned, he might as well have been the
ponderous anecdotal minister in the brick Presbyterian church around the
corner.

"But Jenny is so--so----" murmured Virginia, and stopped because words
failed her. Had Jenny been born in any family except her own, she would
probably have described her as "dangerous," but it was impossible to
brand her daughter with so opprobrious an epithet. The word, owing to
the metaphorical yet specific definition of it which she had derived
from the rector's sermons in her childhood, invariably suggested fire
and brimstone to her imagination.

"Well, I'm not going to do it unless I want to," returned Lucy
positively. "And you may look as shocked as you please, mother, but you
needn't pretend that you wouldn't be glad to see me."

The difference between the two girls, as far as Virginia could see, was
that Jenny really believed her awful ideas were right, and Lucy merely
believed that they might help her the more effectively to follow her
wishes.

"Of course I'd be glad to see you, but, Lucy, it pains me so to hear you
speak flippantly of your marriage. It is the most sacred day in your
life, and you treat it as lightly as if it were a picnic."

"Do I? Poor little day, have I hurt its feelings?"

They were on the way upstairs, following a procession of wedding
presents which had just arrived by express, and glancing round over the
heads of the servants, she made a laughing face at her mother. Clearly,
she was incorrigible, and her passing fear, which had evidently been
entirely due, as Virginia had suspected, to one of her rare attacks of
nervousness, had entirely disappeared. In her normal mood she was
perfectly capable of taking care of herself not only within the estate
of matrimony, but in an African jungle. She would in either situation
inevitably get what she wanted, and in order to get it she would shrink
as little from sacrificing a husband as from enslaving a savage.

And yet a few hours later, when she stood beneath her bridal veil and
gazed at her image in the cheval-glass in her bedroom, she presente