e the ideal and ethereal being whom you have been so faithfully
impersonating all the afternoon!" exclaimed Hadria.

A fair, faint, admirably gentle creature, floating in a mist of tulle,
was wafted out of the brougham, the spring sunshine burnishing the pale
hair, and flashing a dazzling sword-like glance on the string of
diamonds at her throat.

It seemed too emphatic, too keen a greeting for the faint ambiguous
being, about to put the teaching of her girlhood, and her pretty hopes
and faiths, to the test.

She gave a start and shiver as she stepped out into the brilliant day,
turning with a half-scared look to the crowd of faces. It seemed almost
as if she were seeking help in a blind, bewildered fashion.

Hadria had an impulse. "What would she think if I were to run down those
steps and drag her away?" Professor Theobald shook his head.

Within the church, the procession moved up the aisle, to the sound of
the organ. Hadria compared the whole ceremony to some savage rite of
sacrifice: priest and people with the victim, chosen for her fairness,
decked as is meet for victims.

"But she may be happy," Lady Engleton suggested when the ceremony was
over, and the organ was pealing out the wedding march.

"That does not prevent the analogy. What a magnificent hideous thing the
marriage-service is! and how exactly it expresses the extraordinary
mixture of the noble and the brutal that is characteristic of our
notions about these things!"

"The bride is certainly allowed to remain under no misapprehension as to
her function," Lady Engleton admitted, with a laugh that grated on
Hadria. Professor Theobald had fallen behind with Joseph Fleming, who
had turned up among the crowd.

"But, after all, why mince matters?"

"Why indeed?" said Hadria. Lady Engleton seemed to have expected
dissent.

"I think," she said, "that we are getting too squeamish nowadays as to
speech. Women are so frightened to call a spade a spade."

"It is the _spade_ that is ugly, not the name."

"But, my dear?"

"Oh, it is not a question of squeamishness, it is the insult of the
thing. One insult after another, and everyone stands round, looking
respectable."

Lady Engleton laughed and said something to lead her companion on.

She liked to listen to Mrs. Temperley when she was thoroughly roused.

"It is the hideous mixture of the delicately civilized with the brutally
savage that makes one sick. A frankly barbarous ceremony, where there