However, while she could not quite convince herself that she loved, she became convinced without effort that she was happy, that she was going to be still happier. The excitement wrought her into a state of exaltation and swept her through the wedding ceremony and the going away as radiant a bride as a man would care to have. There is much to be said against the noisy, showy wedding. Certainly love has rarely been known to degrade himself to the point of attending any such. But there is something to be said for that sort of married start--for instance, where love is neither invited nor desired, an effort must be made to cover the painful vacancy his absence always causes. The little general's insistence on a "real wedding" was most happy for him. It probably got him his bride. III THE intoxication of that wedding held on long enough and strongly enough to soften and blunt the disillusionments of the first few days of the honeymoon. In the prospect that period had seemed, even to Mildred's rather unsophisticated imagination, appalling beyond her power to endure. In the fact--thanks in large part to that intoxication--it was certainly not unendurable. A human being, even an innocent young girl, can usually bear up under any experience to which a human being can be subjected. The general in pajamas--of the finest silk and of pigeon's-egg blue with a vast gorgeous monogram on the pocket--was more grotesque, rather than more repellent, than the general in morning or evening attire. Also he--that is, his expert staff of providers of luxury--had arranged for the bride a series of the most ravishing sensations in whisking her, like the heroine of an Arabian Night's tale, from straitened circumstances to the very paradise of luxury. The general's ideas on the subject of woman were old fashioned, of the hard-shell variety. Woman was made for luxury, and luxury was made for woman. His woman must be the most divinely easeful of the luxurious. At all times she must be fit and ready for any and every sybaritic idea that might enter her husband's head--and other purpose she had none. When she was not directly engaged in ministering to his joy she must be busy preparing herself for his next call upon her. A woman was a luxury, was the luxury of luxuries, must have and must use to their uttermost all capacities for gratifying his senses and his vanity. Alone with him, she must make him constantly feel how rich and rare and expensive a prize he had captured. When others were about, she must be constantly making them envy and admire him for having exclusive rights in such wonderful preserves. All this with an inflexible devotion to the loftiest ideals of chastity.