"Molly is a grain of sand in a hurricane, nowadays," said Morrison seriously. "It seems that the exigencies of divine convention decree that a girl who is soon to be married belongs neither to herself, to her family, to her fiancé—oh, least of all to her fiancé—but heart and soul and body to a devouring horde of dressmakers and tailors and milliners and hairdressers and corsetières and petticoat specialists and jewelers and hosiery experts and—"
They were all laughing at the interminable defile of words proceeding with a Spanish gravity, and Mrs. Marshall-Smith broke in, "I don't hear anything about house-furnishers."
"No," said Morrison, "the house-furnisher's name is F. Morrison, and he has no show until after the wedding."
"What are your plans?" asked Mrs. Marshall-Smith.
"Nothing very definite except the great Date. That's fixed for the twenty-first."
"Oh, so soon … less than three weeks from now!"
Morrison affected to feel a note of disapproval in her voice, and said with his faint smile, "You can hardly blame me for not wishing to delay."
"Oh, no blame!" she denied his inference. "After all it's over a month since the engagement was announced, and who knows how much longer before that you and Molly knew about it. No. I'm not one who believes in long engagements. The shorter the better."
Sylvia saw an opportunity to emerge with an appearance of ease from a silence that might seem ungracious. It was an enforced manoeuver with which the past weeks had made her wearily familiar. "Aunt Victoria's hitting at Arnold and Judith over your head," she said to Morrison. "It's delicious, the way Tantine shows herself, for all her veneer of modernity, entirely nineteen century in her impatience of Judith's work. Now that there's a chance to escape from it into the blessed haven of idle matrimony, she can't see why Judith doesn't give up her lifetime dream and marry Arnold tomorrow."
Somewhat to her surprise, her attempt at playfulness had no notable success. The intent of her remarks received from her aunt and Morrison the merest formal recognition of a hasty, dim smile, and with one accord they looked at once in another direction. "And after the wedding?" Mrs. Marshall-Smith inquired—"or is that a secret?"