Lumsden Griff says sighing is cardiac in its origin, and I wish your father would see him, Ethel. He’s the first doctor in London for the ventricles of the heart. So every one says. But about your ideas, Penelope—" "Good heavens, aunty, I haven’t any left," said Penelope. This was not in the least surprising, for Titania reduced any ordinary gathering to idiocy at the shortest notice. "Oh, but you have," said Titania, "and society cannot endure ideas, my love. Anything but ideas, darling." "Well, well," sighed Bradstock, "what is the use of talking to her, Titania? Pen is Pen, and there’s an end of it." "I wish there was," cried the duchess. "But she rails against marriage. And she’s only twenty-one. Dear, dear me!" "She pays too much attention to you married women," said Bradstock. "How’s the duke, by the way?" As the duke was engaged in running two theatres at the same time, not wholly in the interests of art or finance, Bradstock might have asked after his health at some other juncture. Titania ignored him. "She rails against marriage," lamented Titania. "I don’t," said Penelope. "You do," said her aunt. "It’s only the horrible publicity," said Penelope, "and the way things are done, and the ghastly presents and the bishops and the newspaper men and the horrible crowd outside and the worse crowd inside, and all the horrid fluff and flummery of it. If I’m ever married, I’ll get it done in a registrar’s office." "Oh, Penelope," wailed Ethel. But Titania became terrible. "You shall not be, Penelope," she cried. "I could not stand it. As your aunt, my dear— Oh, my love, I knew some one who was married in that way, and it was a most shocking affair, and of course it turned out that he had been married before and was a bigamist. The scandal was hushed up, and the first wife, who was the sweetest girl, and died of consumption shortly afterward at her father’s vicarage in Kent or Yorkshire, near Pevensey or Pontefract; at any rate it began with a P, and the man, though a villain, was a gentleman, for he married the second one all over again in a foreign place, with a chaplain officiating; much better than a registrar, who can marry you, I’m told, in pajamas if he likes, though not like a bishop, which one might have expected in his case. You all knew him slightly, at any rate. Never, my dear, get married at a registrar’s." "It’s better than the open shame of a cathedral and a bishop," said Penelope. "Being married is one’s private business, and it’s nothing but horrid savagery to have crowds there!" "Bravo!" said Bradstock, and Titania turned on him.