Conversation -- Fiction; Entertaining -- Fiction; Hospitality -- Fiction; New England -- Fiction
Then Allan John and I resumed our reading aloud. We read Longfellow
this time, and a page or two of Marcus Aurelius, and half a
detective story. And substituted orange juice very mercifully for
what had grown to be a somewhat monotonous carousal in malted milk.
Allan John seemed very much gratified with the little silver
whistle from the shipwreck, and showed quite plainly by various
pursings of his strained lips that he was fairly yearning to blow
it, but either hadn't the breath, or else wasn't sure that such a
procedure would be considered polite. Really by six o'clock I had
grown quite fond of Allan John. It was his haunted eyes, I think
and the lovely lean line of his cheek. But whether he was
animal--vegetable--mineral--Spirituelle--or Intellectuelle, I,
myself, was not yet prepared to say.
The supper hour passed fortunately without fresh complications.
Everybody came down! Everybody's eyes were like stars! And every
body's complexion lashed into sheer gorgeous-ness by the morning's
mad buffet of wind and wave! Best of all, no one sneezed.
Our little Bride was a dream again in a very straight, very severe
gray velvet frock that sheathed her young suppleness like the
suppleness of a younger Crusader. Her regenerated beauty was an
object-lesson to all young husbands' pocket-books for all time to
come that beauty like love is infinitely more susceptible to bad
weather than is either homeliness or hate, and as such must be
cherished by a man's brain as well as by his brawn. Paul Brenswick,
goodness knows, would never need to choose his Bride's clothes for
her. But lusty young beauty-lover that he was by every right of
clean heart and clean living, it was up to him to see that his
beloved was never financially hampered in her own choosing! A
non-extravagant bride, wrecked as his bride had been by the
morning's tempest, might not so readily have recovered her magic.
The May Girl, as usual, was like a spray of orchard bloom in some
white, frothy, middy blouse sort of effect. With the May Girl's
peculiarly fragrant and insouciant type of youthfulness one never
noted somehow just what she wore, nor rated one day's mood of
loveliness against another. The essential miracle, as of May-time
itself, lay merely in the fact that she was here.
Everybody talked, of course, about the shipwreck.
The Bride did not wear her necklace. "It was too ghostly," she
felt. But she carried it in her hand and brooded over it with the
tender, unshakable conviction that once at least it must have
belonged to "another Bride."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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