gray and purple tissue splits if you look at it, and I
got it all for three dollars. Felicia made it up mostly with glue, I think,
and I will be a dream in it--a dream that dissolves easily. Let's go
shopping." As she thus led me into the maze of dishonest trousseau-buying,
Bess began to ring for Annette.

Of course most women in the world will refuse to admit that shopping can
arouse them from any kind of deadness that the sex is heir to, but a few
frank ones, like myself, for instance, will say such to be the case. For
three weeks I gave myself up to a perfect debauch of clothes, and ended off
each day's spree by dancing myself into a state of exhaustion. Everybody in
Hayesville wanted to give Bess and me parties, and most of them did, that
is, as many as we could get in at the rate of three a day between
dressmakers and milliners and other clothing engagements. Owen got
perfectly furious and exhausted, but Matthew kept in an angelic frame of
mind through it all. I think the long days with Polly out in the open
helped him a lot, though at times I detected a worried expression on the
faces of them both, and I felt sure that they were dying to tell me that it
had been a case of the razor from Rufus' shoe between him and the Belgian
or that the oil was of the grade that explodes incubators, but I gave them
no encouragement and only inquired casually from time to time if the
parental twins were alive. Polly even tried me out with a bunch of roses,
which I knew came from the old musk clump in the corner of the garden which
I had seen rebudded, but I thanked her coldly and immediately gave them to
Belle's mother. I saw Matthew comforting her in the distance, and his face
was tenderly anxious about me all the rest of the evening.

"Dear, are we going to be--be married in town at a church?" Matthew
inquired timidly one afternoon as he drove me home from a devastated hat
shop on the avenue, in which Bess and I had been spending the day.

"No, Matt dear, at Elmnest," I answered kindly, as a bride, no matter how
worn out, ought to answer a groom, though Bess says that a groom ought to
expect to be snapped every time he speaks for ten days before the wedding.
"As long as I have got a home that contains two masculine parents I will
have to be married in it. I'll go out the morning of the wedding, and you
and Polly fix everything and invite everybody in Riverfield, but just the
few people here in town you think we ought to have, no