ir flaunting and fire
had made a wide sweep over the white palaces, Raymond suddenly went
abroad. It was to be a stay of three or four months. He first wrote me
from Paris.

He wrote again in December, also from Paris, and told me _tout court_
that he was engaged to be married. I give this news to you as suddenly
as he gave it to me.

You can supply motives as easily as I. His parents were gone and his
family life was _nil_. The old house was large and lonely. You may
believe him influenced, if you like, by his last view of Johnny McComas
and by Johnny's amazing effect of completeness and content. You may
fancy him as visited by compunctions and mortifications due to his
consciousness of his own futility. Or you may fall back upon the simple
and general promptings that are smoothly current in the minds of us all.
My own notion, however, is this: he never would have married at home;
only an insidious whiff of romance, encountered in France or Italy,
could have accomplished his undoing.

Raymond's own advices were meagre. "Your emotional participation not
particularly desired"--such seemed to be the message that lay invisible
between his few lines. But other correspondents supplied the _lacunae_.
He was to marry a girl whose family formed part of the American colony
in the French capital. At least, the feminine members of the family were
there: the mother, and an elder sister. The father, according to a
custom that still provoked Gallic comment, was elsewhere: he was
following the markets in America. The bride-to-be was between nineteen
and twenty. Raymond himself was thirty-three.

He advised me, later, that the wedding would take place at the end of
February and requested me to obtain and forward some of the quaint
documents demanded at such a juncture by the French authorities. He
added that he hoped for a honeymoon in Italy, but that his fiancee
favored Biarritz and Pau.

The wedding came off at one of the American churches in Paris. It was a
sumptuous ceremonial, aided by a bishop (who was on his travels, but who
had not forgotten to bring along his vestments) and by the attendance of
half the colony. Raymond was obliged to put up with all this pomp and
show, much as it ran counter to his tastes and inclinations. But
fortunately he was made even less of than most young men on such an
occasion; he had few connections on either side of the water, so the
bride's connections dominated the day and made her the chief