[CHAPTER NINE.]
THE POLICY OF THE CLOSED DOOR.
Dilly's wedding took place the following summer, just before Parliament rose, and the resources of our establishment were strained to the uttermost to give her a fitting send-off.
It is true that a noble relative, the head of my wife's family, offered his house for the reception, but Dilly emphatically declined to be married from any but mine, saying prettily that she would not leave the roof under which she had lived so happily until the last possible moment.
Accordingly we made immense preparations. The drawing-room on the first floor, accustomed though it was to accommodate congested and half-stifled throngs of human beings, was deemed too small for the mob of wedding-guests whom Kitty expected.
"You see, dear," she explained, "we can squash up good people as much as we like, because their clothes don't matter; but women in wedding-frocks will be furious if they don't get enough elbow-room to show themselves."
Accordingly a marquee was erected in the garden at the back of the house, opening into the dining-room through the French windows, and it was arranged that Dicky and Dilly were to take their stand in the middle of the same, what time the guests, having lubricated their utterance at the buffet in the dining-room en route, filed past and delivered their congratulations. After that the company was to overflow into the garden, there to be moved by a concord of sweet sounds emanating from a band of assassins in pseudo-Hungarian uniforms.
"And if it rains," concluded Kitty desperately, "they must have an overflow meeting in the basement—that's all!"
My library, as I had feared, was appropriated for the presents, and for several days I transacted the business of State at the wash-hand-stand in my dressing-room, while a stream of callers, ranging from the members of a Working Men's Club in which Dilly was fitfully interested, down to an organisation of Kitty's whose exact title I can never recall (but which Dicky, on first seeing them, immediately summed up as "The Hundred Worst Women"), filed solemnly past rows of filigree coffee-services, silver-backed hair-brushes, and art pen-wipers.