Three weeks afterwards they were married, and Lizzie’s wedding-dress, to her trembling joy, was fully described in the Sunington Weekly Chronicle.
CHAPTER IV—LADY PHAYRE AND THE COMING MAN
“I WISH something new would happen,” said Lady Phayre.
“There is the session just begun,” replied Mr. Aloysius Gleam, drawing his arm-chair an inch nearer the fire. “We can promise you many New Year novelties.”
“Call you them novelties?” asked Lady Phayre. “They will be as old as—as the antepenultimate barrel-organ tune.”
“You want to go too fast. Great political reforms move slowly.”
“Yes, that is true—deadeningly true. I think I read it once in a newspaper.”
Gleam laughed, and spread out his hands before the blaze. He was familiar with her mood—a mild spiritual unrest, induced by supreme bodily comfort and intellectual disturbance. He had the faculty of the aesthetic as well as ultrademocratic tendencies, and he appreciated the harmony between her mood and the dim afternoon hour with its gathering shadows in comers of the room. Her comfortable attitude, with one hand hanging over the arm of the chair; her costume, a dark fur-edged tea-gown; her expression of wistful meditation—all betokened a relaxation of fibre trying to pamper itself into depression. So the Member laughed, and a smile played round his clean-shaven lips in the silence that followed.