On a console under a mirror a single candle was burning. Brushes, combs, and boxes of pins lay beside it. On the walls hung a mass of cloaks, hats and all that sort of thing.
Oho, the ladies' dressing room!
Slowly I became conscious of what had happened. I looked at the clock. Nearly two. Somewhere, as though at a great distance, the playing of a piano and the scraping and sliding of dancing feet in time with the music.
My wedding!
I combed my hair, arranged my necktie, and heartily wished I might lie right down in my lovely hard camp bed and pull the covers over my ears, instead of--brr!
Well, there was nothing to be done about it. So I started for the reception rooms, though without any real feeling of shame, as I was still too sleepy and drowsy to comprehend the state I was in fully.
At first nobody noticed me.
In the rooms where the gentlemen were sitting the smoke was so thick that at only a few feet away all you could discern was merely the vague outlines of human bodies. A very steep game of cards was under way, and my father-in-law was relieving his guests of their money so neatly that had he had three more daughters to marry off he would have become a rich man.
He called it "making wedding expenses."
I glanced in at the room where the dancing was going on. The dowagers were fighting off sleep, the young people were hopping about mechanically, while the pianist opened his eyes only when he struck a wrong note. My sister was holding a glass of lemonade on her lap and was inspecting the lemon seeds. It was a doleful sight.