CHAPTER XIII
DETAILS
The young rush along the pathway of life cheerfully surmounting or overturning every obstacle, while their more cautious elders look on aghast at their nerve.
When once Harry Marksby had taken the plunge and was accepted as a lover of Maudie’s, he was determined not to let the grass grow under his feet. May was then about three parts over, and Harry insisted that the wedding should be, as he called it, “pulled off” before the end of July.
“But why this hurry?” asked Regina, who, in spite of her modernity, still retained some traces of her aboriginal ways of thought.
“No hurry at all; but why waste time, Mrs. Whittaker?” said Harry. “What is there to wait for? We have plenty of money. I always go away for August, and, for an occasion like this, my father won’t think anything of it if I take a good share of September too. A man only gets married now and again, you know.”
“But why not leave it till the autumn?”
“Because I want to take Maudie for a good trip abroad. She wishes it—I wish it. What do you say? Clothes? Oh, surely we needn’t consider a few clothes. Get as little as she can do with for a continental trip—lay the wedding gown up in lavender, and let Maudie buy the rest of her things in Paris as we come home.”
“There’s reason in it,” said Alfred Whittaker, from the depths of his big chair.
“I don’t like my daughter being married in such a hurry as this,” said Regina, half hesitatingly.