As I look back on those weeks of days, each one crowded like a ragbag with rubbish, the figure of Edna stands out radiant. You would never have thought her the mother of the bride--or, indeed, a mother at all. A woman who for many years leads a virginal or almost virginal life gets back the vestal air of the unmarried girl. This air had returned to Edna. She had it as markedly as had Margot. It was most becoming to her piquant style of beauty, giving it the allure of the height that invites ascent and capture, yet has never been desecrated. And how she did enjoy the grandeur--the great names, the gorgeous presents of curiously and costlily wrought gold and silver and crystal, and precious stones, the succession of panoramas of ultra-fashionable life, with herself and Margot always the center. I used to stand aside and watch her and feel as if I were hypnotized into vivid hallucinations. I recalled the incidents of our early life--Brooklyn, the Passaic flat, the squat and squalid homes of our childhood. I recalled our people--hers and mine--tucked away in homely obscurity among the New Jersey hills. But by no effort of mind could I associate her with these realities. She had literally been born again. I looked at the other Americans of humble beginnings--and there were not a few of them in that society. All had retained some traces of their origin, had some characteristics that made it not difficult to connect their present with their past. But not Edna. At the wedding--in the most fashionable church in the West End--Margot looked weary and rather old, gone slightly stale from too long and hard preliminary training. Edna was at her best--delicate, fragile, radiant. How the other women hated her for that time-defying beauty of hers! Many of the women of her still youthful age retained much of the physical attractiveness of youth. But there was not another one who was not beginning to show the effects of dissipation--of too much food and wine and cigarettes, of lives devoid of elevating sensations, of minds used only for petty, mean thoughts. But Edna seemed in the flower of that period when the secrets of the soul have as yet made no marks upon the countenance. You would have said she was a merry and romantic girl. I could not fathom that mystery. I cannot fathom it now. Its clew must be in her truly amazing powers of self-deception and also in that unique capacity of hers for forgetting the thing, no matter what, that is disagreeable to remember. When we were at last alone, with the young couple off for the yacht Lord Shangway had loaned them for the honeymoon, with the last guest gone and the last powdered flunkey vanished--when she and I were alone, she settled herself with a sigh and said: “I wish I could make it begin all over again!” “You must be built of steel,” said I. “I am supremely happy,” said she, “and have been for weeks. Nothing agrees with me so thoroughly as happiness.”