The marriage night was a failure. One might _almost_ have foreseen it. George Augustus tried to be passionate and ecstatic, and merely succeeded in being clumsy and brutal. Isabel tried to be modestly yielding and complying, and was only _gauche_. She suffered a good deal from George Augustus’s bungling defloweration. And, as many a sweet Victorian bride of dear old England in the golden days of Good Queen Vicky, she lay awake hour after hour, while George Augustus slept stertorously, thinking, thinking, while the tears ran out of her eyes, as she lay on her back, and trickled slowly down her temples on to the bridal pillow.... It’s too painful, it’s really too painful—all this damn silly “purity” and cant and Luv and ignorance. And silly ignorant girls handed over in their ignorance and sweetly-prettiness to ignorant and clumsy young men for them to brutalize and wound in their ignorance. It’s too painful to think of. Poor Isabel. What an initiation! But, of course, that ghastly night had its consequences. In the first place, it meant that the marriage was legally consummated, and could not be broken without an appeal to the Divorce Courts—and I don’t even know if you could get divorced in the golden days of grand old Mr. Gladstone, bless his heart, may hell be hot for him. And then it meant that Isabel shrank from sexual intercourse with George Augustus for the rest of her days; and, since she was a woman of considerable temperament, _that_ implied the twenty-two lovers already stirring in the womb of futurity. And finally, since Isabel was as healthy as a young woman could be who had to wear madly tight corsets and long insanitary hair and long insanitary skirts, and who had rudimentary ideas of sex hygiene,—finally, that _nuit de rêve_ gave Isabel her first baby. [ II ] The baby was christened Edward Frederick George—Edward after the Prince of Wales (later H.M. King Edward VII), Frederick after his grandfather, George after his father. Isabel wanted to call him George Hartly, but dear Mamma saw to it that there was as little Hartly as possible about _her_ grandson. * * * * *