“Can’t he make it?” asked Maud. The notion of a titled adjunct to her marriage appealed strongly to her practical mind.
“Not quite. The best he can do is the 16th. Possibly later. So they’ll be married quite quietly from my apartment and have a month’s honeymoon before he goes back.”
To all of which Darcy listened in the stupefaction of despair. She was roused by Helen Barrett’s bear-hug of congratulations.
“Do you know,” said Helen, “I haven’t really quite been able to believe it up to now. Oh, Darcy, I’m so glad for you!”
With some faltered excuse for getting out of the room, the subject of this untimely felicitation escaped. Her brain seethed with horrid conjectures. Here was a furtherance of her phantom plans for which she was wholly unprepared. Doubtless Gloria had something in mind; but what could it be? When the day of inevitable reckoning should come, Darcy could see no adequate solution other than suicide or permanent disappearance. Meanwhile Gloria was putting her to the test of the severest judgment by asking her flat-mates:
“Don’t you think Darcy looks well?”
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so likewise is the lack of it. Having become habituated to regarding their junior partner as aesthetically and femininely negligible, the other girls failed to appreciate the vital changes that were in progress. Miracles, set under our eyes, do not arrest us. Otherwise we should all stand about in stupefaction watching trees grow.
“She looks healthy,” granted Maud indifferently.
“And she’s a lot more cheerful and lively,” added Helen. “But she’ll always be—well, just Darcy.”
Being a scrupulously courteous person Miss Gloria Greene refrained from the prophetic comparison which suggested itself to her annoyed mind as appropriate, and contented herself with the inward retort: