Nevertheless, they considered it the polite and the correct thing to celebrate in some sort of way. So they went to a hotel, where Mr. Petersen ordered an elaborate lunch. He was just a little ill-at-ease, not being a frequenter of hotels, and the lunch was too heavy, too prolonged. Frankie conscientiously ate all she could, and praised everything.
But no use denying that her heart ached! She caught a glimpse of themselves in a mirror, saw her own proud distinction so incongruously escorted by Mr. Petersen’s enormous Socialistic bulk, and how could she help thinking of how Lionel had looked under similar circumstances, how help remembering his ways of ordering lunches ...?
Perhaps Mr. Petersen was rather heavy-hearted too, with memories of his other wedding—or what he had imagined at the time to be a wedding. Who knows but that for him there had been infinite romance in his dowdy Minnie?
They had planned to go back to Brownsville Landing and close up the house there, and then the next morning proceed by motor car with the children and the Hansens to the new home. For the last time they boarded the train, for the last time went flying through that familiar country along the river bank.
“I suppose,” said Mr. Petersen, in his slow way, “that we are beginning a new life. I shall do all I can to make it a happy one for you.”
She smiled at him kindly.
“We’re old friends,” she said, and then grew very serious, “Chris,” she said, “we’ve missed—oh, almost everything, haven’t we? But if we can only make up to the children for all they’ve lost, all they’ll have to miss—that’s enough for us, isn’t it?”
“That’s enough,” he repeated, “enough to fill our lives.”