“Uncle David says he wants to spend my last evening with me. We are going to dine here, and then go to the theater together. I am going to try to tell him how I feel about things, but I am afraid he won’t give me the chance. Life is a strange mixture of things you want and can’t have, and things you can have and don’t want. It seems almost disloyal to put that down on paper about Uncle David. I do want him and love him, but oh!—not in that way. Not in that way. There is only one person in a woman’s life that she can feel that way about. Why—why—why doesn’t my Uncle Peter come to me?”
CHAPTER XX
The Makings of a Triple Wedding
“Just by way of formality,” David said, “and not because I think any one present”—he smiled on the five friends grouped about his dinner table—“still takes our old resolution seriously, I should like to be released from the anti-matrimonial pledge that I signed eight years ago this November. I have no announcement to make as yet, but when I do wish to make an announcement—and I trust to have the permission granted very shortly—I want to be sure of my technical right to do so.”
“Gosh all Hemlocks!” Jimmie exclaimed in a tone of such genuine confusion that it raised a shout of laughter. “I never thought of that.”
“Nor I,” said Peter. “I never signed any pledge to that effect.”
“We left you out of it, Old Horse, regarding you as a congenital celibate anyway,” Jimmie answered. 252
“Some day soon you will understand how much you wronged me,” Peter said with a covert glance at Beulah.