"Yes; I should say those things would be worth about two hundred and fifty dollars now that they are third-hand," I answered Bess's excited eyes, giving her a look of well-crusted affection, for there are not many women in the world, with unlimited command of the material that Bess has, who would not have offered me a spiritual hurt by trying to give me back my thousand dollars' worth of old clothes which she had not needed in the first place when she bought them.
"Now, that's all settled, and we'll begin to stretch that three hundred dollars to its limit. We won't care if things do tear, just so they look smart until you and Matthew get to New York. Matthew won't be the first bridegroom to go into raptures over a thirty-nine-cent bargain silk made up by a sixty-dollar dressmaker. I'm giving Owen a few deceptions in that line myself. That gray and purple tissue splits if you look at it, and I got it all for three dollars. Felicia made it up mostly with glue, I think, and I will be a dream in it—a dream that dissolves easily. Let's go shopping." As she thus led me into the maze of dishonest trousseau-buying, Bess began to ring for Annette.
Of course most women in the world will refuse to admit that shopping can arouse them from any kind of deadness that the sex is heir to, but a few frank ones, like myself, for instance, will say such to be the case. For three weeks I gave myself up to a perfect debauch of clothes, and ended off each day's spree by dancing myself into a state of exhaustion. Everybody in Hayesville wanted to give Bess and me parties, and most of them did, that is, as many as we could get in at the rate of three a day between dressmakers and milliners and other clothing engagements. Owen got perfectly furious and exhausted, but Matthew kept in an angelic frame of mind through it all. I think the long days with Polly out in the open helped him a lot, though at times I detected a worried expression on the faces of them both, and I felt sure that they were dying to tell me that it had been a case of the razor from Rufus' shoe between him and the Belgian or that the oil was of the grade that explodes incubators, but I gave them no encouragement and only inquired casually from time to time if the parental twins were alive. Polly even tried me out with a bunch of roses, which I knew came from the old musk clump in the corner of the garden which I had seen rebudded, but I thanked her coldly and immediately gave them to Belle's mother. I saw Matthew comforting her in the distance, and his face was tenderly anxious about me all the rest of the evening.
"Dear, are we going to be—be married in town at a church?" Matthew inquired timidly one afternoon as he drove me home from a devastated hat shop on the avenue, in which Bess and I had been spending the day.
"No, Matt dear, at Elmnest," I answered kindly, as a bride, no matter how worn out, ought to answer a groom, though Bess says that a groom ought to expect to be snapped every time he speaks for ten days before the wedding. "As long as I have got a home that contains two masculine parents I will have to be married in it. I'll go out the morning of the wedding, and you and Polly fix everything and invite everybody in Riverfield, but just the few people here in town you think we ought to have, not more than a dozen. Have it at five o'clock." I thought then that I fixed that hour because everybody would hate it because of the heat and uncertainty as to style of clothes.
"All right, dear," answered Matthew, carefully, as if handling conversational eggs.
"Miss Ann, where do you want us to fix the wedding—er—bell and altar?" Polly ventured to ask timidly a few days later.
"The parlor, of course, Polly. I hate that room, and it is as far from the barn as possible. Now don't bother me any more about it," I snapped, and sent her flying to Matthew in consternation. Later I saw them poring over the last June-bride number of "The Woman's Review," and I surmised the kind of a wedding I was in for. That day I tried on a combination of tull, lace, and embroidery at Felicia's that tried my soul as well as my body.
"It's no worse than any other wedding-dress I ever saw; take it off quick, Madame," I snapped as crossly as I dared at the poor old lady, who had gowned me from the cradle to the—I was about to say grave.
"Eh, la la, mais, you are très deficile—difficult," she murmured reproachfully.