Thus, from a hundred churches, east and west and south and north, the newly joined couples came to Hallowells’ to make merry with their friends. They came from Fulham and Wimbledon, from Kilburn and Epping, from Finchley and Streatham and Woolwich and Denmark Hill; and the hinges of the Bell wore loose with much work, and parcels’ delivery vans took the cakes away in great loads each evening, and the strains of the Wedding Marches never ceased, and enough champagne was opened to have converted the great silver-and-white Central Hall into a swimming-bath. And besides the wedding parties, sightseers came also. One of these came daily, occupying a chair under the garlanded and cherubimed twenty-four-hours’ clock. His eyes were agog; sometimes, as one in a dream, he half rose from his chair, grasped the hand of some passing bride or bridegroom, murmured something unintelligible, and sat down again, once more watching in a sort of stupid ecstasy. He was Mr. Wellcome.... And Walter Wyron came with Laura Beamish, and they clutched one another, and, both speaking at once, said that Amory and Cosimo must on no account miss this, and Walter sent Cosimo a postcard that very night. Amory and Cosimo came on the morrow, but missed Walter and Laura in the crush, and retired to a sort of recess on the second floor, past which the lift-well ascended. There, sitting down on a narrow padded bench without a back, they talked. Cosimo had all but won Amory. Only a few points remained on which it was necessary that their understanding should be quite clear.
“You see, Cosimo,” Amory explained earnestly, while the noisy parties went up and down in the lift, “in one sense two rational beings have hardly the right to marry at all as long as the Divorce Laws are in their present chaotic condition. Even a Judicial Separation places a quite unjust stigma on the woman, and the Restitution Decree has become a mere formal step to Divorce itself. There’s absolutely no Equality in the contract. As Equity it’s a farce from beginning to end. I’m not sure that the wisest thing to do wouldn’t be to wait until the Law is altered. I want that one-sided plea of cruelty done away with, or else made the same for both. It’s anomalous—it belongs to the Stone Age.”
“I quite agree,” said Cosimo slowly. “But we have our private arrangement about that. It’s quite understood that if it isn’t a success we each go our own way. You’re to be as free as I am, Amory. I’ve no right to choose your friends for you, male or female. If things come to the worst, I fancy I’m not altogether without a sense of fairness and rationalness and philosophy. So our eyes are quite open.”
Amory mused. “It’s a risk for all that,” she murmured. “There may be all sorts of things about both of us that neither of us knows. In a sense, we’re complete strangers.”
“Then,” Cosimo urged, “let us be brave and take it. There’s very little doubt that they’ll reform those ridiculous laws before long. They’re bound to. With the spread of Democracy cheaper Divorce is inevitable; and when it becomes quite common much of the stigma you speak of will disappear. Look here: I’ve an idea!... Why shouldn’t we start a sort of private Insurance against not getting on together—put away a sum each year for the contingency, so that the expenses of Divorce would be met out of a fund? We could arrange some means of drawing on it, too, in case we decided to live apart. Don’t you think that’s a good idea?”
“Ye-es,” said Amory slowly. “Ye-es. It’s certainly a Law, I should say, that the only real way of keeping people together is to leave them perfectly free to separate whenever they like. The day of force, whether physical or legal, is over. That’s what makes all that downstairs so exquisitely funny. They think that the way to bind yourself is to tie yourself fast! So of course it’s our duty to dissociate ourselves as far as ever we can from all that.... Isn’t it nearly time ’Orris and Jellies were here?”...
“Oh, they aren’t due for half an hour yet. Now about Incompatibility, Amory——”
And their love-making went on.
The remark about ’Orris and Jellies had to do with their dissociation from the semi-communal feasting that was going on in the Central Hall. It had been Amory’s idea that this dissociation would be more complete if ’Orris and Jellies also feasted with the rest of the world, and the joke had been cheap at the cost of the qualifying purchase at Hallowells’ of Jellies’ wedding-veil. So ’Orris, Jellies, Mrs. ’Ill, a woman who lent a hand at the Creek sometimes, together with one or two friends, had been told off to a table midway between Hymen and the Bell. Amory and Cosimo intended to watch from the gallery. They still regarded the world and its happenings much as they might have regarded a stereoscope, to be taken up for a few minutes when they found themselves in the humour for it, and put down again when it no longer amused them; and if Dorothy did not like the presence of this particular party at Hallowells’, that could only be because Dorothy was a snob.
So Amory and Cosimo, presently descending by the lift again, watched Jellies’ nuptial party from the balcony, and went on to discuss their own affairs again. They would be married—unless even yet they amicably agreed that it would be best that they should not marry—at a Registry Office; and if they did happen to feel hungry afterwards (certainly not unless) they would go to the Lettuce Grill. The noise that came up from the vast oval below was no doubt a mere reaction from the false religiosity in the church an hour or so before, and champagne certainly heated the blood. Amory drank nothing at meals, Cosimo only barley-water. Jellies’ husband, as they could see from where they leaned over the rail, was already a little drunk on champagne; there was no doubt whatever that he would presently be quite drunk on beer. And these were the people to whom England looked for a eugenically begotten race! Black eyes were in front of Jellies, and intervals of returning to her mother when ’Orris happened to be “in,” and a shamefully large family, and work at the Jelly Factory as before, and very little prospect indeed of ever having either the money or the initiative to obtain a Divorce. It made Amory sad....