"I only mark the hours that shine."
It was after lunch before Mary found a moment in which to begin her record, and then it was in unconscious imitation of Betty's style that she wrote the events of the morning. Probably she would not have gone into details and copied whole conversations if she had not heard the extracts from Betty's diaries. Betty was writing for practice as well as with the purpose of storing away pleasant memories, so it was often with the spirit of the novelist that she made her entries.
"It seems hopeless to go back to the beginning," wrote Mary, "and tell all that has happened so far, so I shall begin with this morning. Soon after breakfast we went to Rollington in the carriage, Joyce and Betty and I on the back seat, and Lloyd in front with the coachman. And Mrs. Crisp cut down nearly a whole bushful of bridal wreath to decorate Eugenia's room with. When we got back May Lily had just finished putting up fresh curtains in the room, almost as fine and thin as frost-work. The furniture is all white, and the walls a soft, cool green, and the rugs like that dark velvety moss that grows in the deepest woods. When we had finished filling the vases and jardinières, the room itself all snowy white and green made you think of a bush of bridal wreath.
"We were barely through with that when it was time for Lloyd and Aunt Elizabeth to go to the station to meet Eugenia. There wasn't room for the rest of us in the carriage, so Betty and Joyce and I hung out of the windows and watched for them, and Betty and Joyce talked about the other time Eugenia came, when they walked up and down under the locusts waiting for her and wondering what she would be like. When she did come, they were half-afraid of her, she was so stylish and young-ladified, and ordered her maid about in such a superior way.
"Betty said it was curious how snippy girls of that age can be sometimes, and then turn out to be such fine women afterward, when they outgrow their snippiness and snobbishness. Then she told us a lot we had never heard about the school Eugenia went to in Germany to take a training in housekeeping, and so many interesting things about her that I was all in a quiver of curiosity to see her.
"When we heard the carriage coming, Betty and Joyce tore down-stairs to meet her, but I just hung farther out of the window. And, oh, but she was pretty and stylish and tall—and just as Betty had said, patrician-looking, with her dusky hair and big dark eyes. She is the Spanish type of beauty. She swept into the house so grandly, with her maid following with her satchels (the same old Eliot who was here before), that I thought for a moment maybe she was as stuck-up as ever. But when she saw her old room, she acted just like a happy little girl, ready to cry and laugh in the same breath because everything had been made so beautiful for her coming. While she was still in the midst of admiring everything, she sat right down on the bed and tore off her gloves, so that she could open the queer-looking parcel she carried. I had thought maybe it was something too valuable to put in the satchels, but it was only a new kind of egg-beater she had seen in a show-window on her way from one depot to another. You would have thought from the way she carried on that she had found a wonderful treasure. And in the midst of showing us that she exclaimed:
"'Oh, girls, what do you think? I met the dearest old lady on the sleeper, and she gave me a receipt for a new kind of salad. That makes ten kinds of salad that I know how to make. Oh, I just can't wait to tell you about our little love of a house! It's all furnished and waiting for us. Papa and I were out to look all over it the day I started, and everything was in place but the refrigerator, and Stuart had already ordered one sent out.'
"Then Lloyd opened the closet door and called her attention to the great pile of packages waiting to be opened. She flew at them and called us all to help, and for a little while Mom Beck and Eliot were kept busy picking up strings and wrapping-paper and cotton and excelsior. When we were through, the bed and the chairs and mantel and two extra tables that had been brought in were piled with the most beautiful things I ever saw. I never dreamed there were such lovely things in the world as some of the beaten silver and hand-painted china and Tiffany glass. There was a jewelled fan, and all sorts of things in gold and mother-of-pearl, and there was some point lace that she said was more suitable for a queen than a young American girl. Her father has so many wealthy friends, and they all sent presents.
"Opening the bundles was so much fun,—like a continual surprise-party, Betty said, or a hundred Christmases rolled into one. Between times when Eugenia wasn't exclaiming over how lovely everything was, she was telling us how the house was furnished, and what a splendid fellow Stuart is, and how wild she is for us to know him. I had never heard a bride talk before, and she was so happy that somehow it made you feel that getting married was the most beautiful thing in the world.
"One of the first things she did when she opened her suit-case was to take out a picture of Stuart. It was a miniature on ivory in a locket of Venetian gold, because it was in Venice he had proposed to her. After she had shown it to us, she put it in the centre of her dressing-table, with the white flowers all around it, as if it had been some sort of shrine. There was a look in her eyes that made me think of the picture in Betty's room of a nun laying lilies on an altar.