Thyrza was nervous too, her head drooped like an over-blown rose upon its stalk, and Mr. Sumption’s manner was not of the kind that soothes and reassures. He shouted at the bride and bridegroom, and “thumped at” various members of the congregation who whispered or (later in the proceedings) yawned. He was not often asked to officiate at weddings, and had apparently decided to make the most of this one, for he wound up with an address to the married pair so lengthy and apocalyptic that Mrs. Beatup became anxious as to the fate of a pudding she had left to “cook itself,” and rising noisily in her pew creaked out through a silence weighted with doom. “And whosoever hath not a wedding garment,” the minister shouted after her, “shall be cast into the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth”—for which Mrs. Beatup never forgave him, as she had spent nearly three shillings on retrimming her bonnet, “and if her cape wurn’t good enough fur him, she reckoned he’d never seen a better on the gipsy-woman’s back.” The service came to an end at last, and the congregation pushed after the bride to see her get into the cab drawn by a pair of seedy greys, which would take her the few yards from the chapel to the farm. The breakfast was to be at Worge, for Thyrza had no kin besides the bachelor cousin, and it was considered more fitting that her husband’s family should undertake the social and domestic duties of the occasion. The feast was spread in the kitchen, which had been decorated with flags, lent for the afternoon from the club-room of the Rifle Volunteer. The unsugared wedding-cake was a terrible humiliation to Mrs. Beatup, who felt sure that, in spite of her repeated explanations, everyone would put it down to poverty and meanness instead of to the tyranny of “Govunmunt.” However, she had restored the balance of her self-respect by providing wine (at eighteen-pence the bottle). There was much laughter and good-humour and the wit proper to weddings as the guests squeezed themselves round the table. Even Mr. Sumption’s five-minute grace, in which he approvingly mentioned more than one dish on the table, but added to his score with Mrs. Beatup by referring to the wine as poison and “the forerunner of thirst in hell,” was only a temporary blight. The bride and bridegroom alone looked subdued, their sleek heads drooping together, their hands nervously crumbling their food—also Ivy, who was heard to say in a hoarse whisper to Nell, “If I can’t go somewheres and taake my stays off I shall bust.” However, in time she forgot her constriction in flirting with Thyrza’s bachelor cousin, who had pale blue eyes, bulging out as if in vain effort to catch sight of a receding chin, and was exempt by reason of ruptured hernia from military service.