And what woman lives that does not find more rapture in shopping with a full purse or an elastic charge-account than in any other earthly or spiritual pleasure?
The barbaric love of beads and red feathers and mirrors has never been civilized out of the sex. The male succeeds in love and elsewhere by what he thinks and makes and gives; the female by what she looks and wears and extracts. The shops are her art-museums, her gymnasiums, her paradises, and the privilege of reveling among them is more voluptuous than any other of her sensualities. Shopping takes the place of exploration. That is her Wanderlust.
And so when Willie Enslee arrived at the Cabot house with all his weapons ready to force Persis to an early marriage, he was astounded—he was even dismayed—to find that she offered no resistance, but greeted his proposal with delight. It was like making ready to besiege and storm a castle and being met half-way there by flower-girls instead of troops. Persis was so instant with acceptance that he took credit to himself. He cherished a pitiful delusion that she wanted to marry him—was actually in a hurry to marry him!
But it was because she had seen in the shops the new things for this year's brides. They were absolutely ravishing! Whatever they are in reality or in retrospect, fashions are always ravishing as they dawn on the horizon. Such beauties brighten as they make their entrance and wither as they take their flight.
To prepare herself for a wedding did not mean—to Persis, at least, whatever it may mean to other women—that she must prepare her soul for a mystic union with a stranger soul. It meant that she must prepare her wardrobe for the inspection of all sorts of critics, from the most casual to the most intimate. It meant not only buying a veil and some orange blossoms and a meekly glorious white dress, but it meant outfitting a private department store. It meant preparing for travel and a prolonged campaign known as a honeymoon, rather than entering shyly into obscurity and domestic bliss. It meant not half so much what the groom should think and see as what to show and what to whisper to the bridesmaids, hysterically envious and ecstatically horrified.
Persis' father had nearly bankrupted himself once before over the wedding of Persis' sister into the British peerage, when she ceased to be the beautiful Miss Cabot and became the Countess of Kelvedon, and had the privilege of being nineteenth in the fifty-seven varieties of precedence among British women.
Mr. Cabot had learned nothing from that investment. He encouraged Persis to extravagances she would never have dared even in her present mood. It was like chirruping and taking the whip to a horse that was already running away.
He sent a long cablegram to Persis' sister, insisting that she come over at once for the wedding and bring the Earl and the eight-year-old Viscount of Selden, the six-year-old Honorable Paul Hadham, and the five-year-old Lady Maude Hadham. Persis received at once a brief reply from the Countess:
"Congratulations old girl snooks says awfully glad to be with you if papa pays the freight we are stony. Elise."
"Snooks" was the Earl of Kelvedon. Sometimes Elise called him "Kelly" for short. Papa cabled the freight—and "freight" was beginning to describe his burdens. But he was in for it; yet he felt that, come what come would, he should henceforward lean comfortably on the Enslee Estates.