I wonder how he found such society as attended my wedding. I shall not describe it; I did not describe Johnny's--probably the more important event of the two for the purposes of this calm narrative. Yet, if you will permit me, I shall touch on two points. I wish, first, to say that, in my ears and to my eyes, the name "Elsie" is just as dear and charming as it ever was. Perhaps, at one period of my courtship, I wondered if the name would wear. No name more delightful and suitable for a gay, arch, sweet young girl of twenty; but how, I asked myself, will the name sit on a woman of forty, or on one of sixty? Well, I will confess that, at forty, a certain strain of incongruity appeared; but it marvelously vanished during the following score of years, and the name now seems utterly right for the dainty figure and gentle face of my lifelong companion. And though our eldest daughter is unmarried and thirty-five, we have never regretted passing on this beautiful name to her. My second point must deal with Raymond's attitude toward me on my wedding-day and on the days preceding it. He was stiff, constrained, dissatisfied--merely courteous toward my Elsie, and not at all cordial to me. I wondered whether he blamed me for thus bringing him back home; but the real reason, as I came to understand later, was quite different. He regarded the marriage of a friend as a personal deprivation, and the bride as the chief figure in the conspiracy. After my defection, or misappropriation, he solaced himself by trying to make one or two other friendships. When these friends married in turn, like process produced like results. These men, however, he threw overboard completely; in my case, he showed, after a while, some relenting, and ultimately even forgiveness. By the time he came to marry on his own account, the last of his very few bachelor friends had "gone off"; so there was no chance of inflicting on anybody that displeasure which others had several times inflicted on him. He sent Elsie a suitable present, and stood beside me through the ceremony as graciously as he was able. "I wish you both great joy," he said firmly, at the end; and it was six weeks before we saw him in our little home. PART IV I Johnny McComas was still carrying on his business life and his home life in the suburb where he had married, when I came, finally, to make my first call on the domestic group of which he was the nub. Still in the future was the day when he was to move into town, and to have also a summer home on the North Shore, and to make some of his father-in-law's spare funds yield profitable results, and to arouse among wistful clerks and unsuccessful "operators" an admiring wonder as the youngest bank-president in the "Loop."