Never dreaming that Forbes was on the liner that had gone down the bay a few moments before, Persis fastened her binocular on the island and tried to pick him out from among the men whom distance rendered lilliputian. She selected some vague promenader and sent him her blessings. If he ever received them he never knew whence they came.
Forbes was groping toward her in thought like a wireless telegrapher trying to reach another and unable to come to accord. Forbes was entering upon the Atlantic Ocean for the first time, and Persis was embarking on another sea equally new to her, for marriage is a kind of ocean to a woman. Maidens struggle toward it and consecrate themselves to it from far inland; they come forth upon the roaring wonder of its cathedral music; the surf flings white flowers at their feet. They venture farther and encounter the first shocks of the breakers, and thereafter the sea lies vast and monotonous with happiness or grief and their interchange. But the prosperity of the voyage is less from without than from within the boat. Persis was not lucky in the captain she had shipped with.
To-day's Persis on the boat was altogether another woman from yesterday's Persis. The toil and fever of preparation, the bacchantic orgies of purchase, the dressing up, the celebration of the festival—these were the joys of the wedding to her, and she had drained them to the full. They left her exhausted and sated. The anticipation was over, the realization begun.
In some wiser communities the bride and groom separate for a day or two after the ceremony. But Persis had no such breathing-space. Persis was delivered to Willie Enslee in a state of fagged-out nerves, muscles, and brain. To him, however, the weeks of preparation had been a mere annoyance, a postponement, a prelude too long, too ornate. And when at last the prize was his he found the fact almost intolerably beautiful. He possessed Persis Enslee! She had no longer even a name of her own. Miss Cabot had been merged into the Enslee Estates.
One does not expect to-day the childlike innocence that was revealed or pretended by the brides of other years. Nowadays even their mothers "tell them things." And Willie knew that Persis was neither ignorant nor ingenuous. Her gossip, the scandal she knew, the books and plays she discussed, her sophisticated attitude toward people and life had long ago proved that, whatever she might be, she was not without knowledge. She knew as much as Mildred Tait, and her talk was nearly as free, but always from the cynical, the flippant, or the shocked point of view.
Willie did not expect to initiate an ignoramus into any unheard-of mysteries. He expected at most a certain modest reluctance and confusion. He was dumfounded to be met with icy horror and shuddering recoil. After the first repulse the terror with which she cringed away from his caresses enhanced her the more.
He imputed it to a native purity. He believed—and it was true—that she had come through all the years and temptations and the dangerous environments with her body and her soul somehow protected to this great event. It was a kind of purity. But not what he thought it.
Persis' creed—if she had thought much about it—would have been the creed of many a woman: that love sanctifies all that it inspires; and that unchastity is what Rahel Varnhagen defined it—intercourse without love, whether legalized or not.
If Persis had married the man she loved, the man whose touch was like a flame, she would still have been terrified; but love would have hallowed the conquest, changed fright into ecstasy, and glorified surrender.
Willie's touch had always chilled her clammily. What she saw in his eyes now offended her utterly, filled her with loathing and with panic as before a violation. But after this first rebellion she regained control of her fears and reasoned coldly with herself. When she had said "Yes" to Willie's courtship, and when she had made her affirmations in the church, she had given him her I. O. U. She was not one to repudiate a gambling loss. She forbore resistance, but she could not mimic rapture. Yet rapture was part of the bargain. Soul and flesh could not pay the obligation her mind had so lightly incurred.