"When can it be? Let's fix a date early. Do, there's a dear! There'll be a peculiar joy to Desmond and me in having in our own house Osborn and you, the very two people who always told us the truth about marriage, and urged us to go and do likewise!"
"The truth?" Marie echoed.
"How wonderful it was!" Julia said sublimely.
As Julia sat there, glowing and content, Marie recognised that she had forgotten all the sad things she had been told and that only the glory remained. Julia had harked back to that first year in which the young Kerrs had chanted together:
"Marriage is the only life."
And separately:
"A woman can be an angel."
"A man a brute? A man's a god."
Julia continued: "To-day's Monday. We're still furnishing, of course, as I told you, but that won't matter, will it? Can you both come to dinner on Thursday and see the two happiest people in the world?"
"Edifying as the sight must be—" Marie began with smiling lips. But then she put the baby down and, covering her face with her hands, cried bitterly: "Would the two happiest people in the world like to see the two miserablest people in it?"