“No; books, music; studying human conditions. I want to study the slow healing of industrial wounds and determine the best treatment for them. I have made the real me go ’way, ’way off somewheres for a long time until I won my pile of gold that helped me capture the girl I loved. Now it is done the real me wants to come back and stay.”
“Oh, I see,” she said, vaguely. “Of course there are tiny things to brush up on––greeting people, and you mustn’t be so in earnest at dinner parties and contradict and thump your fist. It isn’t good form.”
“When whippersnappers like Gaylord Vondeplosshe–––”
“Sh-h-h! Gay’s a dear. He is accepted every place.”
“We’re nearly there, tough luck! One kiss, please; no one can see. Say you care, then everything else must true up.”
The wedding took place at high noon in church, with the bishop and two curates to officiate. There was a vested choir singing “The Voice That Breathed O’er Eden”; a thousand dollars’ worth of flowers; six bridesmaids in pastel frocks and picture hats, shepherdess’ staffs, and baskets of lilies of the valley; a matron of honour, flower girls, ushers; a best man, a papa, an aunty in black satin with a large section of an ostrich farm for her hat––and a bridegroom.
After the wedding came the breakfast at the Constantine house. Though certain guests murmured that it was a trifle too ultra like the house itself, which was half a medieval castle and half the makings of a village fire department, it was generally considered a success. Nothing was left undone. The bride left the church amid the ringing of chimes; her health was drunk, and she slipped up to the rose-taffeta-adorned boudoir to exchange her ivory satin for a trim suit of emerald green. Everyone wished on the platinum circlet of diamonds and there was the conventional throwing of the bouquet, the rush through the back of the grounds to the hired taxi, the screams of disappointment at the escape––and Mr. and Mrs. O’Valley were en route on their honeymoon.
It remained for the detectives to guard the presents, the society reporters to discover new adjectives of superlative praise, and the guests to drink up the champagne and say: “Wonderful.” “Must have cost thousands.” “Handsome couple. Couldn’t have happened in any other country but America.” “War fortune.” “Oh, yes, no doubt of it––hides and razors turned the trick.” “Well, how long do you think it is going to last?”