CHICAGO, March, 1895.
A PROTHALAMION
The best man has gone for a game of billiards with the host. The maid of honor is inditing an epistle to one who must fall. The bridesmaids have withdrawn themselves, each with some endurable usher, to an appropriate retreat upon the other coasts of the veranda. The night is full of starlight in May. The lovers discover themselves at last alone.
He. What was that flame-colored book Maud was reading to young Bishop?
She. The Dolly Dialogues; you remember we read them in London when they came out.
He. What irreverent literature we tolerate nowadays! I suppose it's the aftermath of agnosticism.
She. It didn't occur to me that it was irreligious.
He. Irreverent, I said—the tone of our world.
She. But how I love that world of ours—even the Dolly Dialogues!
He. Because you love it, this world you feel, you are reverent toward it. I have hated it so many years; it carried so much pain with it that I thought every expression of life was pain, and now, now, if it were not for Maud and the Dolly Dialogues, these last days would seem to launch us afresh upon quite another world.