“Yes, we’re pretty bad,” admitted Norman. “Not so bad as we used to be, but pretty bad.” He laughed. “They accuse us of loving money. Why, we are mere beginners at it. We haven’t learned how to idle or how to spend money except in crude, tiresome ways. And to love money deeply you must know how to idle and how to spend. Money’s the passion with these people. How they do need it!”
Neither shall I linger over the details of the engagement and the wedding. For all that was important about either I refer you to the newspapers of London and New York. They gave everything that makes a snob’s eyes glisten and a snob’s mouth water. My wife has somewhere—she knows exactly where—a scrapbook, and my daughter has another of the same kind. Those scrapbooks are strongly bound and the pages are of the heaviest time- and wear-resisting paper. In them are pasted columns on columns of lists of titles, of descriptions of jewels and dresses, of enumerations of wedding gifts. Margot received things costing small fortunes from people she barely knew well enough to invite. They gave in the hope—the good hope—of gaining the valuable favor of the Marchioness of Crossley, a great lady by reason of her title, a greater lady by reason of the ancientness of the Massingford family, and at the top and summit of greatness by reason of her wealth.
That last item, by the way, was vastly overestimated. Everyone assumed that Crossley had sold much more dearly. No one but those intimately concerned dreamed what a bargain I had got.
You may be picturing a sordid affair, redolent of the stenches of commercialism. If you are, gentle reader, you are showing yourself unworthy of your own soulfulness, unworthy of the elegant society into which I have introduced you. I have been giving simply the plain facts—a mere skeleton upon which you, versed in society columns and society novels, and skilled in the art of hiding ugly truths under pretty lies, may readily drape the flesh and the garments of sentimentality and snobbishness. You will then have the truth as it appeared to the world—a handsome, manly groom, every inch of him the patrician; a wondrous lovely, innocent, pure young bride, looking the worthy mate of the great noble she had won with her beauty and her sweetness; a background of magnificent houses and equipages, of grand society people, of lackeys in livery without number; an atmosphere of luxury, refinement, perfumed with the fairest flowers and the most delicate artificial scents. You are seeing also the high and noble motives of all concerned—the joy of parents in a daughter sentimentally wooed and won to happiness; the generous and kindly feelings of all the friends; the lavish and affectionate overflowing of costly gifts; above all, the ecstatic young couple wrapped up in their love for each other. Flesh up and beautify the skeleton to your taste, gentle reader. You will not go amiss.
I must linger a moment on the happiness of my daughter. It was too spiritual to be of this earth. As soon as the miserable, unimportant money matters were settled, and her mother gave her full leave to love, she threw herself into it with all the ardor of the heroine of a novel. She had two diamond hearts made—at the most fashionable jewelers in Paris, you may be sure. Upon the inside of the one she kept she had engraved, under his picture, “From Hugh to Margot.” In the one she gave him there surrounded her picture in diamond inlay, “To Hugh from his dear love Margot.”
Each was to wear the heart round the neck until death. Again and again I caught her dreaming over hers, sometimes with tears in her limpid eyes. Again and again I caught her scribbling, “Margot, Marchioness of Crossley, Viscountess Brear, Countess of Felday and Noth, Baroness de Selve,” and so on through a list of titles which gentle reader will find in “Burke’s” and the “Almanach de Gotha.”
And she had a reverent way of looking at him and a tender way of touching him. Her mother, you will believe, spared neither expense nor pains in getting together the trousseau. But Margot was not satisfied. “Not nearly fine enough for his bride,” she would say. “I’m so afraid he’ll be disappointed.” Then the tears would spring. “Oh, mamma! If he should be disappointed in me!”
“Not so bad as if you were to be disappointed in him,” I put in with no other motive than to cheer her up.
But it only shocked her. “In Hugh!” she exclaimed, meaning in Cecil Robert Grunleigh Percival Hugh Massingford, Marquis of Crossley, etc. “I disappointed in him! Oh, papa! You don’t realize!”
“No, I suppose not,” said I, getting myself away as speedily as my legs would carry me.