The crowd around the bride thinning out a little to find seats at the tables, Professor Green was able to make his way to Mildred and Crittenden. After greeting them, he espied Judy talking sweetly to a stern-looking woman with a hard face and a soft figure, who was dressed severely in a stiff black silk, with most uncompromising linen collar and cuffs. Her iron-gray hair was tightly coiled in a fashion that emphasized her hawk-like expression, but with all she looked enough like Mrs. Brown to establish an undeniable claim to relationship with that charming lady. Mrs. Brown herself, in a soft black crêpe de Chine and old lace collar and cuffs, with her wavy chestnut hair, was more beautiful than any of her daughters, the bride herself having to take a second place.
Judy was delighted to see the professor, and not nearly so astonished as Molly had been, the truth being that Paul had told that young lady of Edwin Green’s arrival, with the expectation that she would inform Molly. But Judy, realizing the state of excitement that Molly was in, determined to keep the news to herself and not give Molly anything more to feel just then, even if in doing so she, Judy, would appear to be careless and forgetful. Judy understood the regard that Molly had for Professor Green—better than Molly herself did. She remembered Molly’s expression and misery when little Otoyo, their Japanese friend at Wellington, had told them of his being so dangerously ill with typhoid, and how Molly had lost weight and could neither sleep nor eat until the crisis had passed.
“Did you ever see such a beautiful wedding in your life?” said Judy.
“Never, and I am told it was all your plan, even to the holly-hock background.”
“Well, you see the idea was floating around in the air, and I was just the one who had her idea-net ready and caught it. Ideas are like butterflies, anyhow—all flying around waiting to be pounced on—but the thing is to have your net ready.”
“Yes, and another thing, not to handle the butterfly idea too roughly. Many an idea, beautiful in itself, is ruined in the working out,” said her companion.
“That is where taste comes in.”
Judy would have liked to chase the metaphor much farther with the agreeable young man, but she remembered that she had set out to fascinate Aunt Clay, and it was Aunt Sarah Clay to whom she had been talking when Professor Green had come up. She introduced him, and Mrs. Clay immediately pounced on him with a tirade against innovations of all kinds.
Looking very much as we are led by the cartoonists to expect a suffragist to look, Mrs. Clay was the most ardent “anti.” Opposed to all progress and innovations, and constantly at war on the subject of higher education of women, she carried her conservatism even to the point of having her grain cut with a scythe instead of using the up-to-date machinery. Professor Green was her natural enemy, for was he not instructor in a girls’ school where, she was led to understand, belief in equal suffrage was as necessary for entrance as the knowledge of Latin or mathematics?
Professor Green, ignorant of the antagonism she felt for him and his calling, endeavored to make himself as agreeable as possible to Molly’s aunt. He listened with seeming respect to her attack on modernism and then turned the subject to the wedding, her pretty nieces and fine-looking nephews.