At eight o'clock that evening, in the Garrison Avenue Rock Church, little Evelyn Kemble, in the bushiest of white skirts and to the accompaniment of organ music rolling over her, placed a white-satin cushion before the smilax-banked altar. Kneeling on it, and to the antiphonal beat of the Reverend Stickney's voice, Lilly Becker and Albert Penny became as one. CHAPTER XI By a strange conspiracy of middle-class morality, which clothes the white nude of life in suggestive factory-made garments, and by her own sheer sappiness, which vitalized her, but with the sexlessness of a young tree, Lilly, with all her rather puerile innocence left her, walked into her marriage like a blind Nydia, hands out and groping sensitively. The same, in a measure, was true of Albert, who came into his immaculate inheritance, himself immaculate, but with a nervous system well insulated by a great cautiousness of life. He was highly subject to head colds and occasional attacks of dyspepsia, due to his inability to abstain from certain foods. He was, therefore, sensitive to draughts and would not eat hot bread. He carried an umbrella absolutely upon all occasions and a celluloid toothpick in his waistcoat pocket. Then, too, he gargled. To chronicle the heroic emotions that motivate men is a fine task. Love and hate and all the chemistry of their mingling that go to form the plasma of human experience. It is a lesser, even an ignominious one to narrate Lilly's kind of anguish during this matinal performance of her husband. She suffered a tight-throated sort of anguish that could have been no keener had it been of larger provocation. Her toes and her fingers would curl and a quick ripple of flesh rush over her. Mornings, when he departed, his kiss, which smelled of mouth wash, would remain coldly against her lips with the peculiar burn of camphor ice. All her sensibilities seemed suddenly to fester. On a week day of the third week of her marriage, in her little canary cage of a yellow bedroom dominated with the monstrous brass bedstead of the period and a swell-front dresser elaborate in Honiton and flat silver, she endured, with her head crushed into the chair back, those noisome ablutions from across the hallway. She was wearing, these first mornings, a rose-colored negligee, foamy with lace and still violet scented from the trousseau chest, and especially designed to pink this early hour. It lay light to a skin that, strangely enough, did not covet its sensual touch. She craved back to the starchy blue-gingham morning dresses. It was as if she sat among the ruins of those crispy potential yesterdays, all her to-morrows ruthlessly and terribly solved. Something swift and eager had died within her. She was herself gone flabby. A wife, with a sudden and, to her, horrid new consciousness that had twisted every ligament of life.