“Oh, God, please . . . Dear God . . .”
Mr. Sullivan paused in his advance. He looked at the disordered heap on the floor. A revulsion of feeling came over him, and he turned away.
“Bah!” he said, angrily. “Women!” and, seizing his hat, he left the house.
CHAPTER 25.
The Cathedral was palpitant with Fashion. For the moment, its dim religious light was lost in the flamboyance of smart Society’s glare. Its serene atmosphere was fractured by cross-currents that blew in from an impious world. The Flesh and the Devil walked on the feet that pressed the red carpet to save from pollution the soles of those who were bidden to the Sloane-Carmichael wedding. And there were many, for Mona Carmichael was a Minister’s daughter and the moving spirit of the Naughty Nine. Also, she was a bride extremely good to look upon. She possessed the slender body of the jeune fils, and an age-old wisdom in the advantageous exhibition of it. When not engaged in devising spectacular “stunts” for her eight disciples, she was usually enjoying masculine approbation expressed in terms that described the speaker as being simply crazy about her. She had reached the point when a modest man was the most boresome thing on earth.
No sermon that was ever preached from the pulpit of the sacred fane would have exposed the mephistophelean cynicism of the present day in its attitude towards the Solemnization of Matrimony by the Church, as did this particular wedding. It might have been a deliberate revival of some medieval mystery play, staged for the purpose of provoking a recreant world to repentance. Men in youth and age were there, whose thoughts throughout the ceremony were never lifted above the level of lubricity. Their presence at any of the matrimonial pageants of that gallant Defender of the Faith, Henry the Eighth, would have lent a distinct flavour to the atmosphere.
The younger married women among the guests recalled their own weddings, and endeavoured to convey the impression that they had relinquished themselves to their husbands with protest, if not martyrdom. They wore an unconvincingly pensive air.
The spinsters betrayed a touch of malice, although they tried to look as though feeling that any woman who married was a fool. Bitterly, they realised the transparency of their attitude, and that here and there, people were saying,
“Oh, there’s So-and-so. Isn’t it a pity she never married?”
Over all the Church, there was a restlessness, a strange suppression, louder and more definite than the syllabub of broken conversation.