in youth when my
mother gave one of her luncheon parties; on my return from school, the
house and its surroundings wore a mysterious, exciting and unfamiliar
look, somehow changed by the simple fact that guests sat decorously
chatting in a dining-room shining with my mother's best linen and
treasured family silver and china. The atmosphere of my wedding-day is no
less vivid. The house of Ezra Hutchins was scarcely recognizable: its
doors and windows were opened wide, and all the morning people were being
escorted upstairs to an all-significant room that contained a collection
like a jeweller's exhibit,--a bewildering display. There was a massive
punch-bowl from which dangled the card of Mr. and Mrs. Adolf Scherer, a
really wonderful tea set of old English silver given by Senator and Mrs.
Watling, and Nancy Willett, with her certainty of good taste, had sent an
old English tankard of the time of the second Charles. The secret was in
that room. And it magically transformed for me (as I stood, momentarily
alone, in the doorway where I had first beheld Maude) the accustomed
scene, and charged with undivined significance the blue shadows under the
heavy foliage of the maples. The September sunlight was heavy, tinged
with gold....

So fragmentary and confused are the events of that day that a cubist
literature were necessary to convey the impressions left upon me. I had
something of the feeling of a recruit who for the first time is taking
part in a brilliant and complicated manoeuvre. Tom and Susan Peters flit
across the view, and Gene Hollister and Perry Blackwood and the
Ewanses,--all of whom had come up in a special car; Ralph Hambleton was
"best man," looking preternaturally tall in his frock-coat: and his
manner, throughout the whole proceeding, was one of good-natured
tolerance toward a folly none but he might escape.

"If you must do it, Hughie, I suppose you must," he had said to me. "I'll
see you through, of course. But don't blame me afterwards."

Maude was a little afraid of him....

I dressed at George's; then, like one of those bewildering shifts of a
cinematograph, comes the scene in church, the glimpse of my mother's
wistful face in the front pew; and I found myself in front of the austere
Mr. Doddridge standing beside Maude--or rather beside a woman I tried
hard to believe was Maude--so veiled and generally encased was she. I was
thinking of this all the time I was mechanically answering Mr. Doddridge,
a