"When are you going to be married?" Martha dried her eyes and, crossing to the stove, brought the hot coffee and filled both their cups.
"Very soon," Jean answered wearily. "There's no reason to wait, and Franklin wants to get settled at some work."
Martha winced at the name.
The next moment the door opened and Tom and Elsie and Tommykins came in. Tom was even fatter and redder than usual and more offensively good-natured. He insisted on guessing what had happened, until Jean stopped the flow of his ridiculous suppositions with a brief:
"I am going to be married."
Elsie hugged her, and Jean gathered from the cataract of congratulations that Elsie had never expected her to marry, that marriage was the only thing in a woman's life, that it was one long martyrdom. You were to be pitied if you did and pitied if you didn't. Then Elsie dabbed at her eyes and they all sat down to the late Sunday morning breakfast.
Tom made broad jokes about some people's luck and "turning new leaves." He kept appealing for corroboration to Tommykins and going into spasms of laughter at his son's stare. He wanted to know whether Jean would be able to stand the family now that she was going to marry a highbrow and whether she and Herrick talked in prose or blank verse. He tried with genuine kindness and unfathomable stupidity to fill the silences that settled more and more heavily as breakfast drew to a close.
As soon as it was over and the things cleared away, Martha went upstairs for her Sunday rest. With all her heart Jean wished that she had not told Herrick not to come. She had meant to give this Sunday entirely to her mother, even to go to afternoon service with her. She had known that her marriage would be a blow and had sincerely wanted to ease it as much as possible. But Martha's reception of the news had frozen the suggestion on her lips. Now Jean faced a hot afternoon alone. Upstairs Elsie scolded at Tommykins who refused to be dressed in his Sunday clothes and the new baby helped her brother's efforts by wailing at the top of her lungs. From the hammock under the pine, where he was trying to read the papers, Tom called rough directions for managing the children and finally banged into the house to see that they were executed.
Jean put on her hat, took some paper on which to write to Pat and left the house. In the canyon back of the college grounds it was cool, and Jean lay on her back in a tangle of green, her hands clasped under her head, and wondered just where she would begin. She had so much to say, and yet when she focused it all, it came simply to this:
"I am going to marry Franklin Herrick whom I mentioned to you once. I have known him less than six months and will be married in three weeks."