She gave a start and shiver as she stepped out into the brilliant day, turning with a half-scared look to the crowd of faces. It seemed almost as if she were seeking help in a blind, bewildered fashion.
Hadria had an impulse. “What would she think if I were to run down those steps and drag her away?” Professor Theobald shook his head.
Within the church, the procession moved up the aisle, to the sound of the organ. Hadria compared the whole ceremony to some savage rite of sacrifice: priest and people with the victim, chosen for her fairness, decked as is meet for victims.
“But she may be happy,” Lady Engleton suggested when the ceremony was over, and the organ was pealing out the wedding march.
“That does not prevent the analogy. What a magnificent hideous thing the marriage-service is! and how exactly it expresses the extraordinary mixture of the noble and the brutal that is characteristic of our notions about these things!”
“The bride is certainly allowed to remain under no misapprehension as to her function,” Lady Engleton admitted, with a laugh that grated on Hadria. Professor Theobald had fallen behind with Joseph Fleming, who had turned up among the crowd.
“But, after all, why mince matters?”
“Why indeed?” said Hadria. Lady Engleton seemed to have expected dissent.
“I think,” she said, “that we are getting too squeamish nowadays as to speech. Women are so frightened to call a spade a spade.”
“It is the spade that is ugly, not the name.”