“O Jonas! Don’t!” supplicated Miss Waring with an agonised blush. “I just meant—that I could never go through it—and live.”
“How do you mean, Marthy?” inquired Jonas, utterly dazed.
“Why, I mean,” explained Miss Waring hesitantly, “that there’d have to be a dress. And I never could go down to the store and ask to see white satin, and buy ever and ever so many yards of it, and take it to Hannah Lee, and tell her to make me up a—a wedding gown. I never could in the world. Everybody would know, and talk, and I couldn’t stand it.”
“I s’pose they’d have to know,” said Jonas apologetically. “There’s too much of me to be hid. Is that all?”
“No,” pursued Martha, relentlessly implanting another dart in her lover’s bosom. “There’d have to be a wedding. And I’ll do a good deal for you, Jonas, but I’ll never stand up with you before the minister and have everybody whispering about Martha Waring and her old beau Jonas Lane, and how they’ve got married at last, and it’s a pity they didn’t do it afore.”
“It is a pity, Marthy,” admitted the doleful Jonas, “but——”
“That isn’t the worst, though,” continued Martha, to whom the whole grim scene unfolded itself in its entirety. “The worst would be the rice. They’d throw it at us when we went away, and the people on the cars would see, and it would stick in our clothes, and roll out wherever we went, and everybody would know, and laugh. O Jonas, I can’t! I’m sorry, but I just can’t!”
To poor Jonas world within world of undreamt feminine perversity had of a sudden been revealed. He felt as one bound by cobwebs. But, after staring for some moments in silence at his liege lady, he addressed her again the word.
“Marthy Warin’,” he asked solemnly, “would you marry me if you could do it without rice, and without a weddin’ dress, and without anybody’s knowin’?”
She regarded him with doubt.