offending parcel in her
dressing-case.

CHAPTER XXIX.

A WEDDING TOUR.

Thus Grief still treads upon the heels of Pleasure;
Married in haste, we may repent at leisure.

Congreve.

We all know that weddings are as old as the world, but who is it
that invented wedding tours? Owing to what delusion were they first
instituted?

For a wedding feast there is a reasonable cause, just as there is for
a funeral luncheon, or a christening dinner. There has been in each
instance a trying ordeal to be gone through in a public church. It is
quite right that there should be eating and drinking, and a certain
amount of jollification afterwards amongst the unoffending guests who
have been dragged in as spectators on the occasion. But why on earth,
when the day is over, cannot the unhappy couple be left alone to eat
a Darby-and-Joan dinner together in the house in which they propose to
live, and return peacefully on the morrow to the avocation of their
daily lives? Why must they be sent off amid a shower of rice and
shabby satin shoes into an enforced banishment from the society of their
fellow-creatures, and so thrown upon each other that, in nine cases out
of ten, for want of something better to do, they have learnt the way to
quarrel, tooth and nail, before the week is out?

I believe that a great many marriages that are as likely as not to turn
out in the end very happily are utterly prevented from doing so by that
pernicious and utterly childish custom of keeping up the season known as
the honeymoon. "Honey," by the way, is very sweet, doubtless; but there
is nothing on earth which sensible people get sooner tired of. Three days
of an exclusively saccharine diet is about as much as any grown man or
woman can be reasonably expected to stand; after that period there comes
upon the jaded appetite unlawful longings after strong meats and
anchovies, after turtle-soup and devilled bones, such as no sugar-fed
couple has the poetic right to indulge in. Nevertheless, like a snake in
the grass, the insidious desire will creep into the soul of one or other
of the two. There will be, doubtless, a noble struggle to stifle the
treacherous thought; a vigorous effort to bring back the wandering mind
into the path of duty; a conscientious effort to go on enjoying honeycomb
as though no flavour of richer viands had been wafted to the nostrils of
the imagination. The sweet and poetical food will be lifted once more
resolutely