reason for the grotesqueness of his irritability. "Where's _Molly_
keeping herself nowadays?" she inquired. "She hasn't come over with
you, to tea, for ever so long. The pergola isn't itself without her
sunny head."

"Molly is a grain of sand in a hurricane, nowadays," said Morrison
seriously. "It seems that the exigencies of divine convention decree
that a girl who is soon to be married belongs neither to herself, to
her family, to her fiance--oh, least of all to her fiance--but heart
and soul and body to a devouring horde of dressmakers and tailors and
milliners and hairdressers and corsetieres and petticoat specialists
and jewelers and hosiery experts and--"

They were all laughing at the interminable defile of words proceeding
with a Spanish gravity, and Mrs. Marshall-Smith broke in, "I don't
hear anything about house-furnishers."

"No," said Morrison, "the house-furnisher's name is F. Morrison, and
he has no show until after the wedding."

"What _are_ your plans?" asked Mrs. Marshall-Smith.

"Nothing very definite except the great Date. That's fixed for the
twenty-first."

"Oh, so soon ... less than three weeks from now!"

Morrison affected to feel a note of disapproval in her voice, and said
with his faint smile, "You can hardly blame me for not wishing to
delay."

"Oh, no _blame!_" she denied his inference. "After all it's over a
month since the engagement was announced, and who knows how much
longer before that you and Molly knew about it. No. I'm not one who
believes in long engagements. The shorter the better."

Sylvia saw an opportunity to emerge with an appearance of ease from a
silence that might seem ungracious. It was an enforced manoeuver with
which the past weeks had made her wearily familiar. "Aunt Victoria's
hitting at Arnold and Judith over your head," she said to Morrison.
"It's delicious, the way Tantine shows herself, for all her veneer of
modernity, entirely nineteen century in her impatience of Judith's
work. Now that there's a chance to escape from it into the blessed
haven of idle matrimony, she can't see why Judith doesn't give up her
lifetime dream and marry Arnold tomorrow."

Somewhat to her surprise, her attempt at playfulness had no notable
success. The intent of her remarks received from her aunt and Morrison
the merest formal recognition of a hasty, dim smile, and with one
accord they looked at once in another direction. "And after the
wedding?" Mrs. Marshall-Smith inquire