"What do you know about it?"
"I'd be thrilled to my boots. Why, I feel like that every time they kiss in the film—really I feel an intruder, and as if I shouldn't look."
"Silly penny stories untrue to life!" Joyce said as an echo of her father's scorn, but blushing, nevertheless.
"Well, if you don't appreciate your lover, tell him to wait for me. I'll put up my hair year after next and take him like a shot."
"Of course I appreciate him, or I should not be going to marry him," said Joyce with the dignity of eighteen. "But it's folly to make so much fuss about marriage, seeing that it's the most ordinary thing in life, like being born, or dying."
"The most incomprehensible thing in life, I should imagine," retorted Kitty, wide-eyed with curiosity. "Especially when you come to think of going away for good—or bad, maybe!—with a strange man you know next to nothing of; and all at a blow, having to share the same apartments with him. Merciful Providence! I am sure the Queen never did!"
"It's supposed to be the correct thing," said Joyce rather scared. "Mother says, 'husbands and wives are one,' and 'to the pure, all things are pure'—whatever that has to do with it—so it would be illogical in the face of that to object to such a trifle as sharing a room. 'One has to tune one's mind to accept whatever comes, and to follow in the footsteps of one's parents,'" she quoted.
"How I wish you were not going right away with him, immediately," sighed Kitty enviously. "You might so easily have told me all about it. Nobody tells one anything worth knowing, just as though there was anything to be ashamed about!"
Joyce made no response for the good reason that her mind was wrestling with disquietude. However, in spite of so much that was mysterious, even alarming, she decided, as a prospective bride, to assume the dignity and reserve she had noticed in others and smile patronisingly on inquisitive sixteen.
Shortly afterwards she was married, and she accompanied her "strange man" on their journey to the Unknown, much as a confiding child trusts itself to the guardianship of a loving nurse; prepared to accept as a duty whatever path he might require her to tread.