black
silk with a hemstitched linen apron over it. She ushered them into the
house, took them to their rooms, and whirled John around on a pivot,
it seemed to him, with her interminable directions. His mother, who
had come over to Minneola the day before, came to his room and quieted
her son, and as he got ready for what he called the "ordeal," he could
hear Mrs. Mason swinging doors below stairs, walking on her heels
through the house, receiving belated guests from Sycamore Ridge and
the country,--for the whole county had been invited,--and he heard
her carrying out a dog that had sneaked into the dining room.

The groom missed the bride, and as he was tying his necktie,--which
reminded him of General Ward by its whiteness,--he wondered why she
did not come to him. He did not know that she was a prisoner in her
room, while all the young girls in Sycamore Ridge and Minneola were
looking for pins and hooking her up and stepping on each other's
skirts. For one wedding is like all weddings--whether it be in the
Mason House, Minneola, or in Buckingham Palace. And some there are who
marry for love in Minneola, and some for money, and some for a home,
and some for Heaven only knows what, just as they do in the chateaux
and palaces and mansions. And the groom is nobody and the bride is
everything, as it was in the beginning and as it shall be ever after.
Probably poor Adam had to stand behind a tree neglected and alone,
while Lilith and girls from the land of Nod bedecked Eve for the
festivities. Men are not made for ceremonies. And so at all the formal
occasions of this life--whether it be among the great or among the
lowly, in the East or the West, at weddings, christenings, and
funerals--man hides in shame and leaves the affairs to woman, who
leads him as an ox, even a muzzled ox, that treadeth out the corn.
"The doomed man," whispered John to Bob as the two in their black
clothes stood at the head of the stair that led into the parlour of
the Mason House that night, waiting for the wedding march to begin on
the cabinet organ, "ate a hearty supper, consisting of beefsteak and
eggs, and after shaking hands with his friends he mounted the gallows
with a firm step!"

Then he heard the thud of the music book on the organ, the creak of
the treadle,--and when he returned to consciousness he was Mrs.
Mason's son-in-law, and proud of it. And she,--bless her heart and
the hearts of all good women who give up the joy of their live