“Buy all the clothes I want,” cried Lena with such a deliciously whimsical twist of her little lips that Dick laughed at her irresistible wit. That was coming to be one of Lena’s most fetching little ways, to say what she meant as though it were the last thing in the world that could be expected of her. It was piquant.
It was no time of year to dally in true lovers’ fashion under pine trees in some remote solitude, so Dick took her to cities and theaters and big shops and got his fun out of watching her revel with open purse. Their honeymoon was more full of occupation and less of rapture and sweet isolated intimacy than Dick could have wished, but it was much to watch the color come and go on her cheek in her moments of excitement, to fulfil every capricious whim of her who had been starved in her feminine hunger of caprice, to punctuate the rush of life by celestial moments when she rested a tired but bewildering head against his shoulder and listened silently with drooping lids to all he had to say, to feel that he could answer the admiring glances of other men with the triumphant knowledge, “All this loveliness is mine—only mine.” Lena was so happy, so outrageously happy,—and so shyly affectionate, what could the young husband do but take with content the gifts the gods provided; and Dick was lavish and easily cajoled. The simple trousseau helped out by Miss Elton suddenly swelled to new and magnificent proportions. Lena blossomed and glowed; she tricked herself out in the finery that he provided and paraded before him and the glass until they both laughed with delight. Dick felt that he was playing with a new and sublimated doll, it was all so amusing, so inconsequential, and such fun. Although he wondered a little where it would be appropriate to wear the enormous pink hat with drooping plumes which perched on the showily fluffy head now facing him, he quite appreciated the effect.
“Oh, of course you think I’m stunning,” Lena pouted. “But the question is, what will other people think?”
“Other people aren’t the question at all,” retorted Dick. “Who cares what they think so long as you and I know that you are the very loveliest woman on this whole wide earth—this good old earth.”
When they came home, Lena exulted again in the luxurious rooms that Dick had fitted up for her in fashion more modern than the somber dignity of the rest of the house. Here was another new sensation—a household without bickerings. The elder Mrs. Percival, having accepted the situation, was no niggard in her spirit of courtesy, but very gracious as was her wont, and Lena was astonished to find that she and her new mother-in-law ran their respective lines without collisions. The half-invalid older woman breakfasted in her own room and occupied herself with quiet readings and sewings and drivings, but when she did appear on the family horizon, it was always as a beneficent presence.
Lena purred in the presence of comfort; but when you see a kitten serenely snoozing before the fire, it does not do to leap to the conclusion that this kitten would not know what was expected of her on the back fence at midnight.
If storm and stress should ever come, Dick had himself helped her to feel that beauty would fill the measure, wherever it fell short; that however she might sin, beauty was her sufficient apology.
Mrs. Quincy, established in a little flat with a middle-aged submissive slavey, was as nearly reconciled to fate as her nature would allow. Her rooms were pleasantly furnished, but Lena’s mother was full of the genius of discord, and almost automatically she so rearranged her surroundings that each particular article made strife with its neighbor. Harmony and Mrs. Quincy could not live in the same house. When Lena paid her duty visits (and she was irritated at the frequency with which Dick’s and Madame Percival’s expectations seemed to exact them) she had not only to listen in nauseated impatience to Mrs. Quincy’s minute questions and comments on people and things, but she had also to feel her rapidly-developing tastes offended by her mother’s domestic order.
“Miss Elton’s real kind. She’s been here twice since you was here. And she brought flowers.”
“Mother! And did you have a newspaper on top of that pretty little table?”