"As always," he puffed; "I come from walking or rather limping up and down this weary earth and observing—men and women—how they go about to make themselves miserable."
"Stuff!"
"My dear friends," he continued, placing both hands on the big cane, "you are about to undergo a new and wonderful experience. You haven't the slightest conception of what it is. You think it is love; but it is the holy state of matrimony,—a very different proposition—"
They interrupted him with laughing abuse, but he persisted,—a serious undertone to his banter. "Yes, I have always observed the scepticism of youth, no matter what may be the age of the contracting parties and their previous experience, in this matter. But Love and Marriage are two distinct and entirely independent states of being,—one is the creation of God, the other of Society. I have observed that few make them coalesce."
As relatives again interposed, Fosdick rolled off, ostentatiously thumping his stick on the floor, and made straight for the punch-bowl, where he seemed to meet congenial company.
CHAPTER III
Meanwhile inside the great tent the commotion was at its height, most of the guests—those who had escaped the fascination of the punch-bowl—having found their way thither. Perspiring waiters rushed back and forth with salad and champagne bottles, which were seized by the men and borne off to the women waiting suitably to be fed by the men whom they had attached. Near the entrance the Colonel, with his old friends Beals and Senator Thomas, was surveying the breakfast scene, a contented smile on his kind face, as he murmured assentingly, "So—so." He and the Senator had served in the same regiment during the War, Price retiring as Colonel and the Senator as Captain; while the bridegroom's father, Tyringham Lane, had been the regimental surgeon.
"What a good fellow Tyringham was, and how he would have liked to be here!" the Senator was saying sentimentally, as he held out a glass to be refilled. "Poor fellow!—he never got much out of his life; didn't know how to make the most of things,—went out there to that Iowa prairie after the War. You say he left his widow badly off?"
The Colonel nodded, and added with pride, "But John has made that right now."
The Senator, who had settled in Indianapolis and practised railroad law until his clients had elevated him to the Senate, considered complacently the various dispensations of Providence towards men. He said generously:—