By Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
AFTER each stroke of the brush her bright hair flew out in glittering threads, and in the strong light that centered upon the mirror her vivid little face seemed framed in a sort of unearthly radiance. She looked at the reflected image, at her great, solemn amber eyes, at her white shoulders, at that sparkling flood of hair.
A brief moment of joy that was, however, for almost at once came other thoughts that put an end to it. She grew disconsolate and troubled. With a sigh she threw down the hairbrush, and, going over to the table, picked up her book. Being pretty wasn’t going to do her any good. On the contrary, it might well be another charge against her, another offense in a list already very long.
“They’ll say he married me just because I’m pretty,” she reflected.
And it was not so! Her incomparable Denis had seen and loved and praised all those things in her heart of which she was honestly proud. He loved her because she was valiant and loyal and tender.
“Of course, he does like my looks,” she thought; “but even when I’m old and ugly, he’ll still feel the same toward me. He said so—and I know it!”
But how was she to make these terrible people see all that? What she needed for the ordeal before her was dignity, assurance, poise—that was it. She had even gone so far as to buy a book on etiquette, to find the secret. Useless! No situation like hers was mentioned in the portentous volume. The bride received a visit from her husband’s family, or he brought her to visit them, but there was no help offered to a bride who was suddenly commanded to go all alone to meet her new people for the first time.
She looked through the pages again. “The Etiquette of Weddings”—there had been precious little of that about their wedding—just she and Denis and a strange clergyman, with a deaconess and the sexton for witnesses. “The Bride’s Family”—hers was hundreds of miles away, in Maine. “The Groom’s Family”—she closed the book violently.
“I ought to be ashamed of myself!” she cried.
It seemed like treachery toward her own people, this fear of Denis’s family. There was no reason on earth why she shouldn’t go to them with her head high, no reason why she shouldn’t have poise. She must; she would summon it up from the depth of her anxious heart, so that she might do credit to her Denis.