Cities and towns -- Growth -- Fiction; Wales -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
He began to be aware of the change the Wakes people had wrought in
Llanyglo before the trap had carried him a mile along the road. Twice in
that distance he had to whip up to get through the dust of vehicles
ahead. He had been right in saying that the landaus and brakes and
wagonettes would be all over the place now. They were taking the family
parties back to dinner at the hotels.
Then, still five miles from Llanyglo, he began to allow the brakes and
wagonettes to overtake him again. He had remembered that he was in no
hurry. Hurry would only mean the crowd sooner, the noise sooner, and
supper sooner, with the conversation of June and Minetta. At a place
called Doll he turned aside into a narrow lane that would take him by a
circuitous route into the Porth Neigr road near the stone quarries.
Then, sitting sideways on the seat, with his head sunk and the whiplash
trailing over the dashboard, he allowed the horse to take him at its own
pace.
Of course, he could marry Ynys; there was nothing to be said against
that except that hitherto he had not thought of marriage. Marriage, in
John Willie's observation of his married friends and acquaintances, was
a quite definite and circumscribed thing, in which prospects played a
part, and settlements, and houses of a certain kind, and certain
well-marked changes in the bride's demeanour towards her still
unmarried friends, and a certain tendency to stoutness and baldness on
the part of the groom. Moreover, behind every suggested marriage there
lurked the question whether it "would do." His father and mother, when
he came to speak of marriage, would want to know whether it would "do";
Minetta would have her opinion about whether it would "do"; and if it
did not "do," all his friends and acquaintances would by and by shake
their heads and say that it had been plain all along how _that_ would
turn out....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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