presented); crowds lining the sidewalk; mob outside the church
door--mob inside the church door and clear up to the altar; flowers,
palms, special choir, with little bank-notes to the boys and a big
bank-note to the leader; checks for the ranking clergyman and the two
assistant clergymen, not forgetting crisp bills for the sexton and the
janitor and the policemen and the detectives and everybody else who
could hold out a hand and not be locked up in jail for highway robbery.
Yes, a most fashionable and a most distinguished and a most exclusive
wedding--there was no mistake about that.

No one had ever seen anything like it before; some hoped they never
would again, so great was the crush in the drawing-room. And not only
in the drawing-room, but over every square inch of the house for that
matter, from the front door where Parkins's assistant (an extra man from
Delmonico's) shouted out--"Third floor back for the gentlemen and second
floor front for the ladies"--to the innermost recesses of the library
made over into a banquet hall, where that great functionary himself
was pouring champagne into batteries of tumblers as if it were so much
water, and distributing cuts of cold salmon and portions of terrapin
with the prodigality of a charity committee serving a picnic.

And then the heartaches over the cards that never came; and the presents
that were never sent, and the wrath of the relations who got below the
ribbon in the church and the airs of the strangers who got above it; and
the tears over the costly dresses that did not arrive in time and the
chagrin over those they had to wear or stay at home--and the heat and
the jam and tear and squeeze--and the aftermath of wet glasses on
inlaid tables and fine-spun table-cloths burnt into holes with careless
cigarettes; and the little puddles of ice cream on the Turkish rugs and
silk divans and the broken glass and smashed china!--No--there never had
been such a wedding!

This over, Corinne and Garry had gone to housekeeping in a dear little
flat, to which we may be sure Jack was rarely ever invited (he had only
received "cards" to the church, an invitation which he had religiously
accepted, standing at the door so he could bow to them both as they
passed)--the two, I say, had gone to a dear little flat--so dear, in
fact, that before the year was out Garry's finances were in such a
deplorable condition that the lease could not be renewed, and another
and a cheaper nest had