“In the name of God, Amen!”
A knife ran into Nathan’s heart. Where was Carol this moment and what was she doing? The paper must have been mailed a week before—she had been several days on her honeymoon already.... Carol had wanted him to get the Harvey house in Pearl Street.... Milly’s hand was very sweaty and hard, calloused from the pasting of many boxes.... Where had old Ezra got so many cobwebs on his hat?... Where would he take Milly that first night?... Where was Carol and what——
“Yes! I mean ‘I do!’” he answered anent keeping, loving and cherishing this female in sickness and in health and all the rest of it, whatever it was.
He was dimly conscious that he was trying to get the ring on Milly’s finger; it didn’t fit half so well as it had in the jewelry store. Ezra was grinning—showing ivories like an enameled picket-fence—it was fourteen minutes after nine o’clock—Carol had said she wanted the living room furnished in Mission——
“... I now therefore pronounce you man and wife and may God bless your union, Amen! And it’ll cost you five bucks.”
Nathan and Milly came down into Main Street. It looked quite like Main Street on a hundred other Saturday nights.
“Where’ll we go?” asked Milly, as they paused on the top step in front of the Norwalk Block so as not to be jostled by the grocery-bill-paying, Sunday-meat-buying crowd. She clung to Nathan’s arm with one hand and in the other held her marriage certificate as though she didn’t know what to do with it. Which she didn’t.
“I dunno!” said Nathan vaguely. “What do you want to do?”
“I want to go home and tell Ma and the kids,” returned Milly honestly. “To think when I left the house to-night, I was coming back married! My Gawd!”
They descended the four stone steps and were obliterated at once in the serpentine sidewalk traffic of hopeless mediocrity.