Madge wept on the night before her wedding. Ada did not weep. She was too busy hugging herself because she had surmounted the perils of courtship. She had accomplished her aim in life. She was going to be married.
CHAPTER XIV—HONEYMOONERS
ADA was married in white satin, though Peter sold books to do it and her trousseau lacked essentials. It depends, though, on one’s point of view. Ada thought white satin essential, while another might have put underclothing first. But it is fitting to wear a crown at a coronation and, when the object of one’s life has been to get married, to celebrate in satin the attaining of one’s aim.
It also reminded the congregation that the bride is the central figure at a wedding. People might otherwise have remembered that they did not come because Ada was Ada, but because she was Peter’s daughter.
She entered with réclame into the state of being Mrs. Samuel Branstone, resenting a little the tweeds of Stewart, Sam’s best man, but liking his manners and liking, too, the way in which Sam took it for granted that the day was hers, not his. He did not even obtrude a family.
George was, in fact, obscurely there, hidden among the congregation. He was there in the spirit of schoolboy, playing truant from Anne, who was at home with Madge. Ada thought that the conspicuous absence of Branstones added lustre to her satin. None but the necessary Sam was there.
They went to London, where neither of them had been before, and since it is a bitter thing to have to look back to a boring honeymoon, the choice of place had great discretion. There was so much besides themselves to see in London that they postponed looking at each other till they came home. They saw sights and went to theatres, but though they slept together and rose together and saw the sights (all but one) together there was no realization of “togetherness,” no birth of a new life in which they were not Sam and Ada, but these two in one. They were furiously modest about things which no honeymooner has any right to be modest about. If they are modest about them, they have no right to be honeymooners. It may have been in their case something both worse and better than modesty. It may have been downright shame. Perhaps subconsciously they knew that this was not a marriage, not the coming together of two fit mates. It had no passion in it. There was self when they should have been ecstatically selfless. They were two when they should have been most one.
But Sam, if he fell immensely short of ecstasy, was still too much under her spell to be critical. He wondered a little at the frank delight in being married which she displayed in public, at her flaunting of her new wedding ring, at her advertisement that this was a honeymoon, and contrasted this outward relish with her intimate frigidity; but even this seemed a disloyalty, and he told himself that Ada in a hotel was one person and at home would be another. Ada would “settle down,” and meantime they were in London, and London was waiting to be explored with her.