Then Lorraine dared to voice the matter. “The paper says Thurley will sing to-night,” she ventured.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to go,” Dan answered.
They dropped the subject and spoke of the bromidic details concerning the wedding gifts, what to do with duplicates and the color of the living-room tapestry suite and the beauty of the Queen Anne walnut dining room furnishings which every one said were in better taste than mahogany, the new house with the wonderful fixtures, the electric plugs for lamps, the revolving ice box, the white range, the pergola and sun parlor and the iron deer which was ordered but not yet arrived. How happy two young mortals could have been! Besides, there was the butler’s pantry—heaven knows why it was dubbed butler’s pantry in the Corners—and the garage with a washing rack, if you please! Then there was the wedding itself—a proper chrysanthemum wedding with three bridesmaids, a matron of honor and a ringbearer. Lorraine’s father had married them—“so sweet” as every one agreed—and the church was a bower of blossoms while the wedding cake was in white boxes with the initials of the bride and groom entwined in gold. Lorraine’s wardrobe had been the only meagre thing and that, Dan generously said, would soon be remedied. He had ordered a shower of orchids for her to carry and given her a sunburst of diamonds, while her wedding ring broke all Birge’s Corners’ precedents, for it was a platinum circlet dotted with diamonds. The Corners did not know whether or not to approve this last. It was “going some,” the younger generation said, and the recently married girls boasting of plain and a trifle ponderous gold bands said that they wouldn’t feel respectably married with that funny kind of a ring, but then Lorraine’s father being a minister and every one present at the church, they supposed it was all right—every one had her own ideas.
Lorraine wore a new dress to the opera, one she had bought that morning. Not yet accustomed to her husband’s generosity, she had visited a second-rate shop to obtain the slimsy blossom pink silk with cheap trimming. She had only her travelling coat of dark wool for a wrap and a stupid hat breathing of home millinery.
She knew Dan was not pleased. As she looked at him in his tuxedo she realized that she was not yet “used to being rich”; she would buy the goods for dresses and make them herself, she could then have so many more.
“Will I do for to-night?” she asked timidly, knowing the contrast between herself and Thurley would be cruelly unfair. She winced from it as any woman would wince from having to sit beside the man she loved while he watched the woman of his heart appear in beautiful triumph! Besides, Lorraine had never been to a theater, her father not approving; she was nervous lest she make some embarrassing faux pas.
“Yes, no one knows us in New York,” he said carelessly.
Then they watched Thurley in all her loveliness come on the stage in her Rosina costume of red, yellow and black lace. Lorraine glanced at Dan as Thurley sang and triumphed and sang again and triumphed more and the people near them kept asking who she was. Lorraine, with her pitiful bargain frock, her unpowdered face and awkward bonnet, knew that a shadow had fallen between Dan and herself—Thurley’s shadow—no longer a wild rose, generous and kindly of heart, but a prima donna, the woman that Dan would love hopelessly forever and a day.
She applauded Thurley generously, turning her wistful face to Dan’s to say, “She is lovely, isn’t she?” But Lorraine knew that not even the new house with its furnishings nor her wedding ring nor the diamond sunburst could still all the pain of knowing that she had been “married for spite”; she might be the most tender wife and excellent housekeeper in the world yet she was not Thurley, lovely, tyrannical! And as she watched the opera with Thurley its dominating note and Dan’s moody face now defiant, now almost glad, she recalled the superstition about women who married Birge men,—meek little creatures they were who lived only long enough to bear a son and then smiled contentedly and were snuffed out into the unknown!