On hearing of the engagement, he swooped down on the paternal abode, all agog to have his say in the arrangements. He was now a budding warrior, full of himself and his profession, and horribly cocksure on all subjects in heaven and on earth, a good honest affectionate creature of conventions, but with “a coarse thumb” which he wielded in a promiscuous style, and often planted sheer on the quick. Dacre wanted a wedding that would have astonished the neighbours, and that would more than probably have been the death of the two rarified beings who had borne him, but Gwen, backed by Mr. and Mrs. Fellowes, arranged things quite her own way. The wedding was to be as quiet as a wedding can be. Neither Strange nor Gwen were rich in relations, which simplified matters. Lady Mary must come, of course, and the old Waring uncle, and one or two creatures of an unobservant and fossilized type, not worth mentioning, besides a few of Strange’s belongings. As for friends, when Gwen began to cast about in her mind on that subject, she found that for her, putting aside Mr. and Mrs. Fellowes, none existed. Of the girl friends who usually flock in the wake of a bride, Gwen hadn’t a vestige. She had gone to her room to straighten her thoughts after a hot encounter with Dacre, whose carnal mind still hankered after a proper full-blown wedding, and had been making itself objectionable in a bumptious youthful style. She had lost her cool scornful calm at last, and had given him such a glance from her big eyes as had quelled the British lion in him, and had accompanied it with a lash of her able tongue. “Oh, you are anxious to amuse yourself by importing the world and the flesh down here—here! that they may sneer at two people who, if they have brought children into the world for pure purposes of investigation, are at any rate too good to make sport for your friends. You can get your world and your flesh elsewhere, not here at my expense.” “I never saw anyone just going to be married like you before!” said Dacre, with a dash of his old astonished terror at her. “Probably not, your experience not being wide.” “Strange is a million times too good for you!” To his astonishment he got no immediate retort. Gwen stood up, getting rather white, and went to the door. She stopped in the shadow of the threshold, and a gray shade fell on her face and made it whiter, but a sunbeam caught her hair and turned it to the orange-gold that Dacre hated. “Fools speak the truth a great deal oftener than they have any notion of,” she said, “it is a pity that being thick-headed themselves they can’t know how it hurts.” Now she was in her room reflecting gloomily on things in general. “I never thought,” she said, “I never thought that by any process of reasoning I should be ashamed of the fact of having no girl friends—I used rather to pique myself on it, but upon my word I am ashamed, I am degradingly, abjectly ashamed of it, it is one of the symptoms of my disease.”