"True, I can not draw without you for my model," he said so grand and sweet that it made you feel very strange listening to it, "but I can not live without you for my wife."
This won her. It was enough to win anybody, coming from an artist, and good looking at that.
CHAPTER VII
Being in love with Marcella weighed so on Julius' mind that he couldn't stay in New York but one week where the magazine is that he draws for, so he came back and has been here ever since, loving and drawing and sending them the jobs by mail. Right away they set the wedding for the eleventh of April, which seems like it never will come, me being in a big hurry for it. Poor Julius gets more and more delighted every day, talking a heap about what a happy home they're going to have, not realizing that Chopin and dish-pan don't go together. He stays around and advises Marcella about her clothes and such-like all day long. He says she reminds him of a narcissus, being tall and creamy-skinned, so he wants all her dresses to be either white or light green, the color of right young lettuce. But she knows when really to take his advice and when just to make like she's taking it, the way most ladies do with men.
"Why, it would take a little pink milksop like Bertha Parkes to wear such colors as those," she said behind his back one day. But I don't think Marcella better be calling Bertha a milksop just because she has to handle baby-bottles all the time, for a person never can tell what might happen to them.
One of the nicest things about the wedding is the bridesmaids. They consist of girls born partly here in the country, partly in the cities Marcella has visited and made friends with. The one I like best is Miss Cicely Reeves, though most people around here call her Cis, being very small, with fluffy hair and cute ways and dimples. She has a good many lovers of different kinds, but don't seem to like one above another. She is a great hand to act romantic, such as falling in love with a man in a streetcar, or expecting her future husband to be a certain size and comb his hair a certain way and things like that. This often keeps young ladies from getting married a long time, for mother says you oughtn't to be too choice about size and hair, but I can't help being on that order myself. I do hope I can marry a man on a jet-black charger named Sir Reginald de Beverley who owns acres and acres of English landed gentry.
Miss Cis had that experience with the name of Julius' best man. It happened that we were all sitting on the front step one day when Julius pulled a letter out of his pocket and told Marcella that he had just heard from Malcolm Macdonald, and that he was going to be his best man.
"Who?" asked Miss Cis right quick, looking up from the sprig of bridal wreath she was pulling the flowers off of.
Julius told her the name over again and then told her that he was a very old friend of his and was a fine civil engineer. I used to think a civil engineer was a polite man who ran the trains, but I know now he is a man that gets in the middle of the street with a string and a three-legged thing and measures the road.