"I shan't," he whispered, "when _we_ are married. I shall wear tweeds,
and you shall wear your white frieze coat ... the one in which I first
saw you. How little you've changed in these two years!"
"Have I? I think I've changed such a lot. Oh, Guy, such a tremendous
lot."
He shook his head.
"My rose, if all roses could stay like you, what a world of roses it
would be."
The wedding happened as perfectly as Pauline had imagined it would.
Margaret looked most beautiful with her slim white satin gown and her
weight of dusky hair, while Richard marched about stiff and awkward,
yet so radiant that almost more than anyone it was he who inspired the
ceremony with hymeneal triumph and carried it beyond the soilure of
unmeaning tears, he and Pauline whose laughter was the expression of the
joyous air, since Margaret was too deeply occupied with herself to cast
a single questioning look.
In the evening when the diminished family sat in the drawing-room
without going upstairs to music as a matter of course, Monica announced
abruptly that at the end of the month she was going to be a novice in
one of the large Anglican sisterhoods. It seemed as if she had most
deliberately taken advantage of the general reaction in order that
nobody might have the heart to combat her intention. Pauline and Mrs.
Grey gasped, but they had no arguments to bring forward against the
idea, and when Monica had outlined the plan in her most precise manner,
they simply acquiesced in the decision as immutable.
That night, as Pauline lay awake with the excitement of the wedding
still throbbing in her brain, the future from every side began to assail
her fancy. It seemed to her since Margaret's marriage and Monica's
decision to be a nun that she must be more than ever convinced of her
absolute necessity to Guy's existence. Unless she were assured of this
she had no right to leave her father and mother. No doubt at least a
year would pass before she and Guy could be married, but nevertheless
her decision must be made at once. He had not seemed to depend upon her
so much when he was in London: his letters had no longer contained those
intimate touches that formerly assured her of the intertwining of their
lives. But it was not merely a question of letters, this attitude of his
that latterly was continually being more sharply defined. Somewhere
their love had diverged, and whereas formerly she had always been able
to comfort herself with the certainty that between them love was
exactly equal, now instead she could not help fancying that she loved
him more than he loved her. It would of course be useless to ask him the
question directly, for he would evade an answer by declaring it was
prompted by unreasonable jealousy. Yet was her jealousy so very
unreasonable, and if it were unreasonable was not that another reason
against their marriage?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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