eau was almost as simple for her as for him. She
had been extravagant and luxurious, had accumulated really unmanageable
quantities of clothing of all kinds, far, far more than any woman without
a maid could take care of. The fact that she had not had a maid was in
part responsible for this superfluity. She had neither the time nor the
patience for making or for directing the thousand exasperating little
repairs that are necessary if a woman with a small wardrobe is always to
look well. So, whenever repairs were necessary, she bought instead; and
as she always kept herself fresh and perfect to the smallest detail she
had to buy profusely. As soon as a dress or a hat or a blouse or a
parasol, a pair of boots, slippers, stockings, or any of the costly,
flimsy, all but unlaunderable underwear she affected, became not quite
perfect, she put it aside against that vague day when she should have
leisure or inclination for superintending a seamstress. Within two hours
of her decision she had a seamstress in the house, and they and her
mother were at work. There was no necessity to bother about new dresses.
She would soon be putting off black, and she could get in Paris what she
would then need.

In the whirlwind of those thirty-six hours, she had not a moment to think
of anything but the material side of the wedding--the preparations for
the journey and for the long absence. She was half an hour late in
getting down to the front parlor for the ceremony, and she looked so
tired from toil and lack of sleep that Dory in his anxiety about her was
all but unconscious that they were going through the supposedly solemn
marriage rite. Looking back on it afterwards, they could remember little
about it--perhaps even less than can the average couple, under our social
system which makes a wedding a social function, not a personal rite. They
had once in jesting earnest agreed that they would have the word "obey"
left out of the vows; but they forgot this, and neither was conscious of
repeating "obey" after the preacher. Adelaide was thinking of her trunks,
was trying to recall the things she felt she must have neglected in the
rush; Dory was worrying over her paleness and the heavy circles under her
eyes, was fretting about the train--Del's tardiness had not been in the
calculations. Even the preacher, infected by the atmosphere of haste, ran
over the sentences, hardly waiting for the responses. Adelaide's mother
was hearing the trunks going