Amongst it all, he had little enough time for Ada, and she knew how much she gained by being a luxury instead of a habit. But Sam was not engaged for the sake of being engaged, and as soon as he knew he had made no mistake in his business venture was eager to be married. There were no objections from Ada. This intermittent courtship, in which his duties as a lover took second place to his activities as a business man, suited Ada well, but marriage, finality, the bond suited her better. Even to the end of that engagement it was things for Ada which preoccupied him, rather than Ada herself, and he took the matter of furnishing seriously--from a business point of view, interested less in the furniture he bought than in the discounts he might, by this means or that, secure. He suffered the usual surprise at the cost of mattresses and kitchen equipment, but, to Ada, he appeared royally lavish. Ada did not know of his legacy: she knew that Anne had told her on the top of a fantastic tram-car that Sam had earned two pounds ten a week with Travers, and the scale of this furnishing did not square with what a man could save out of two pounds ten a week. It followed in Ada’s mind that Anne had lied to her, malignantly misrepresenting Sam’s position to frighten her; and the breach between Anne and Ada, which never had much chance of closing, was permanently open. One does not have old connections with an estate agency without being able to rent a good house cheaply. She was going to be mistress of a house which fell little short of the dreams of her boarding-school days. It was certainly “stylish”; she was not sure that it was not positively “smart.” Madge wept on the night before her wedding. Ada did not weep. She was too busy hugging herself because she had surmounted the perils of courtship. She had accomplished her aim in life. She was going to be married. CHAPTER XIV--HONEYMOONERS |ADA was married in white satin, though Peter sold books to do it and her trousseau lacked essentials. It depends, though, on one’s point of view. Ada thought white satin essential, while another might have put underclothing first. But it is fitting to wear a crown at a coronation and, when the object of one’s life has been to get married, to celebrate in satin the attaining of one’s aim. It also reminded the congregation that the bride is the central figure at a wedding. People might otherwise have remembered that they did not come because Ada was Ada, but because she was Peter’s daughter. She entered with _réclame_ into the state of being Mrs. Samuel Branstone, resenting a little the tweeds of Stewart, Sam’s best man, but liking his manners and liking, too, the way in which Sam took it for granted that the day was hers, not his. He did not even obtrude a family.