"I really don't know," said his wife, considering a moment. "It's the Sylvester part that seems most unfamiliar. I had honestly almost forgotten that you had such a decorative middle name. And when I was told that some one called Charles Sylvester had endowed me with all his worldly goods, I admit I felt somewhat surprised."
"You would have been even more so if, at the same time, you had been given a list of them," replied the bridegroom. "I think—to go back to the Archbishop—" he said reflectively, "that the trouble with that man was that he was too high-church. Now my leanings have never been toward high-churchness. Ordinarily my inclinations toward church at all are discernible with difficulty. My enthusiasm regarding it is continually, under normal conditions, at low ebb. And this, I take it, makes me a low-churchman."
"It's a most encouraging sign, to see you embracing any kind of ritual," said Miss Maitland. "Isabel, I have hopes of him yet."
"That is very good of you," replied the bride, smiling amiably at her lord and master—to speak academically.
"Very strange feeling it gives one to be so suddenly married in this way—without any of the conventional preliminaries," Wilkinson continued. "I always imagined that when my time was come, while the grape scissors and sets of Jane Austen and cut glass berry bowls were pouring in on my happy fiancée, I should have one last, lonely, sentimental hour set apart for maiden meditations and twilight reflections over my dead life and half-forgotten past. Also to recover from the effects of my ushers' dinner. An ushers'—girls, have either of you ever given or even attended an ushers' dinner?"
His companions' reply was a laughing negative.
"Well," said the young man, gravely, "to have escaped giving an ushers' dinner is assuredly worth an almost innumerable number of pairs of grape scissors and several entire editions of Jane Austen. Yes, I am certainly to be congratulated, for an ushers' dinner should be shunned like the Bubonic plague. To begin with, the cost is simply colossal. The food, of course, counts for practically nothing, and the drink is only an incidental, though a large one. But repairing the broken furniture, and repapering and redecorating the room in which the function has been held, and purchasing another piano in place of the one which your guests have playfully torn to pieces—those are a few of the things that count."
"They sound as though they did," agreed Miss Maitland.
"Moreover," Wilkinson continued, "if the dinner is given at the club to which you belong, you always put the board of governors in an awkward position, for at their next meeting after your entertainment they can never agree on whether to expel you outright or merely suspend you for three years, and quite often there is bad feeling created by these dissensions; while if you hold the affair at a public restaurant, you risk the friendly ultimate intervention of the police. And then the favors! Why should I present several gentlemen with pearl stick pins, when I have none myself? To be sure I might give my best man the ticket for mine, and he could redeem it whenever he had four dollars, but generally speaking, the answer is in the interrogative."
"On the whole, then," said his bride, "you ought to be reconciled for the loss of your twilight reflections."