Smiling steadily, Catia stood there, waiting until, by very force of motionless persistence, she had focussed every eye upon her person. Then, according to the mandates of the Ladies' Galaxy, she hurled her bridal bouquet down across the banister, not upon the waiting Eva Saint Clair Andrews who hankered for it lustily, but straight against the manly waistcoat of the least and the pinkest one of the visiting clergy, a youth of twenty-five or six who had reluctantly torn himself away from an anxious wife and a croupy baby, on purpose to be on hand at Brenton's wedding. Mercifully for Catia's poise, her young husband forebore explaining to her the reason for the three-fold clerical roar which went up upon the heels of her well-meant attention.
Afterwards, in looking backward, that evening seemed to Scott to stand out as a dream, unforeseen, yet not inconsequential. Nothing that had gone before appeared to him to be able to explain it. It just was, a fact without any planning or volition on his part. He had known Catia from his little boyhood, had been used to her, had counted on her in a sense; but always he had held himself a little bit aloof from her, even when, to outward seeming, he had sought her with the greatest regularity. Early in their intercourse, indeed, he had discovered the main fact of all those which were to govern their later life together: that he could not so much talk over things with her, as talk them over with himself when she was present.
And then, all at once and without warning, Catia had swept in and dominated him completely, dominated him with her oozy layer cake, and her two sorts of lemonade, and with her Princeton grenadier of a hat. Beside it all, he felt himself dwindling into insignificance, despite the hind-side-before waistcoats of the visiting clergymen and his mother's gown of stiff black satin. It was a positive relief to him when he could turn his back upon the whole hot, chattering function, and, with Catia's new gilt-initialled bag to balance his much-rubbed suitcase, go striding away to the station underneath the wintry freshness of the night. Catia had rebelled at the idea of walking to their train; but the one hack afforded by the village had gone away to a funeral in the next town but two.
So they went stepping out into the new life before them: Catia Brenton and Scott, her husband. To Catia it seemed that, the first of her milestones reached, it was time for her to sit down for a while, and rest, and take a little comfort out of thinking over what she already had achieved. To Scott, the first stage of his journey had scarcely been begun. Indeed, it did not even start from that night, nor from any night in which Catia's memory could have a share. And yet, asked, he would have been swift to affirm that he loved Catia; that life ahead of him, without her for his wife, would be unsatisfactory, perhaps a little vacant. Catia had always been a part of his environment, ever since the long-gone day when she had hailed him, sodden in his weeping, the while he cooled his nether man upon the chilly doorstep.
For nearly twenty years, they had been meeting life together, and comparing notes upon the impressions they had gained. Often and often, each one had found the other's notes a cipher, had lacked the cipher's proper code. Nevertheless, there had been a certain sense of intimacy in the mere fact of the comparison. Without Catia in his past, Scott Brenton would have been lonely. Therefore he felt it safe to reason that, without her in his future, the loneliness would become infinitely worse. The marriage, in its inception, might have been altogether Catia's doing. In the end, he had been giving it his full assent, and he took his marriage vows in all sincerity, determined to do his best towards their fulfilment.
His fingers shut quite closely, then, upon the slippery handle of Catia's new bag, and he stepped a bit nearer to her side, as they halted beneath the shining stars, to look back upon what they left behind them. Catia saw the huddled gathering of the village people, already looking a little dowdy to her critical eyes. Scott only saw four faces, grouped in perspective: his mother, tearful, a little tremulous, yet radiant in her full content; behind her, two of the visiting clergy, classmates and chums of the divinity school, and, still behind these two, the eager young face of the curly-headed rector of the many hyphens, the man who first had opened his eyes to a brand-new gospel, one of fatherly affection, not of pursuant wrath, a gospel elastic as the mind of man, plastic as the flowing life of all the ages, not a hard and fast affair whose boundaries were laid down for all time, hundreds of years before. And this was the man of them all, and not the broadcloth village parson, whom Scott Brenton had chosen to pronounce himself and Catia man and wife.
Why not?
Scott waved his hand. His mother sought her handkerchief, though not to wave it. His two classmates saluted him, the one with Catia's big bouquet, the other with a crochetted "throw" snatched from the nearest chair. Above them all, though, the curly-headed rector flung up his arm in greeting, and with his arm his voice.
"Bless you, old man, and keep at it! Remember I'm always in the same old corner, if you ever need me."
And Scott Brenton took the assurance with him, as he entered into his new life.