"You shall not be, Penelope," she cried. "I could not stand it. As your aunt, my dear— Oh, my love, I knew some one who was married in that way, and it was a most shocking affair, and of course it turned out that he had been married before and was a bigamist. The scandal was hushed up, and the first wife, who was the sweetest girl, and died of consumption shortly afterward at her father's vicarage in Kent or Yorkshire, near Pevensey or Pontefract; at any rate it began with a P, and the man, though a villain, was a gentleman, for he married the second one all over again in a foreign place, with a chaplain officiating; much better than a registrar, who can marry you, I'm told, in pajamas if he likes, though not like a bishop, which one might have expected in his case. You all knew him slightly, at any rate. Never, my dear, get married at a registrar's."
"It's better than the open shame of a cathedral and a bishop," said Penelope. "Being married is one's private business, and it's nothing but horrid savagery to have crowds there!"
"Bravo!" said Bradstock, and Titania turned on him.
"Did I not say all this was your fault, Augustin? You were no more fit to be her guardian than you are to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Am I a savage, Penelope? and did I not get married in a cathedral, a most beautiful cathedral, all Gothic and newly restored at a vast expense? My dear, I am amazed and horrified and shocked to think that you should not perceive the quite exquisite fitness of being married in a piece of lovely Gothic architecture, to the very loveliest music, breathing over Eden, and so on, while all your dearest friends shed tears of purest joy—"
"To see her got rid of," said Bradstock.
And even Ethel Mytton laughed.
"Augustin! Ethel Mytton! How can you say such things and laugh? It's wicked; it's indecent!"
"Yes," said Penelope, "that's what I say. There's nothing to choose between your way and the American way the millionaire women have over there, when they hold a flower-show in a gilded room, and get married under a bell of roses at the cost of a hundred thousand dollars. I'd rather be knocked down by a nice savage, or run away with by a viking, or caught by a pirate. I won't be breathed over in Eden by a stuffy crowd. If—if—"
"Oh, if what?" gasped Titania.
"If I ever do get married," said Penelope, "I'll never tell any of you beforehand!"