“That’s me,” thought Jimmy. He felt that he had a private and particular claim on Christmas, for it was his birthday. Now birthdays were becoming an old story to Jimmy. He had had quantities of them, and this would be the sixth; but a wedding was something new. “What was a wedding?”
Sometimes people came to the house to be married, and papa married them in the parlor, the children not being allowed to go in. But that “didn’t count;” what was a wedding?
“Where’ll they put it?” asked wee Lucy.
“It isn’t a thing you can put anywhere; it isn’t a vase or a teapot,” replied Edith. “It’s only something that folks do. Aunt Vi is going to marry Mr. Sanford,—no, he’s going to marry Aunt Vi.”
This did not help the matter much.
“What do they do it for?” asked Jimmy.
Edith herself was perplexed as to that, though she did not like to own it.
“Oh, mamma says Mr. Sanford is coming here because papa is a minister!” She spoke proudly, as if the world held but one. “Papa is a minister, and can do it just right. ’Twill be a great deal worse than Thanksgiving and Christmas. A monstrous cake, black as a shoe,—Kyzie didn’t mean I should know about that,—and chicken salad, and lobster salad, and I think turkey salad. Ice-cream, I know; ice-cream,—ever so many colors, just like a bed of flowers. And—and—well, I can’t remember the rest.”
Jimmy’s eyes grew very brilliant. The mention of black cake, and cream all the colors of the rainbow, had placed the wedding in a much clearer light. He went and reported to wee Lucy, and Lucy mounted a chair and told the looking-glass.
“Auntie’s going to be mallied! Papa’ll be there in his pulpit right in the parlor. Roses and i-scream; worse’n Kismus, worse’n birf-days!”