"A bride with a young husband and a beautiful home," she remarked tartly, "seeking something to do! In my day, a bride was about the busiest and the happiest person in the community." Her voice took on a tone of tender reminiscence, and a little color crept into the wrinkled pallor of her cheeks, and she perked her head a bit coquettishly, in a youthful manner not unbecoming, as she continued: "I remember how happy—oh, how happy!—I was then!"
Cicily, however, displayed a rather shocking lack of sympathy for this emotion on the part of her relative. She was, in fact, selfishly absorbed in her own concerns, after the manner of human nature, whether young or old.
"Yes," she said, almost spitefully, "I have noticed how always old married ladies continually remember the happy time when they were brides. A bride's happy time is as much advertised as a successful soap.... But I—I—well, I'm not a bride any longer—that's all. I've been married a whole year!"
"A whole year!" Mrs. Delancy spoke the word with the fine scorn of one who was looking forward complacently to the celebration of a golden wedding anniversary in the near future.
Cicily, however, was impervious to the sarcasm of the repetition.
"Yes," she repeated gloomily, "a whole year. Think of it.... And all the women in my family live to be seventy. Mamma would have been alive if she hadn't been drowned. A good many live to be eighty. Why, you're not seventy yet. Poor dear! You may have ten or a dozen more years of it!"
Mrs. Delancy was actually horrified by her niece's commiseration.
"Cicily," she eluded, "you must not speak in that manner. I've been happily married. You—"
The afflicted bride was not to be turned aside from her woe.
"I'm perfectly wretched," she announced, fiercely. "Auntie, Charles is a bigamist!"