Men are crazy about both, so you really are
rather stupid, darling, or cold-hearted. Surely you must feel all
squiggly down your back whenever Ray hugs and kisses you?"

"What do you know about it?"

"I'd be thrilled to my boots. Why, I feel like that every time they kiss
in the film--really I feel an intruder, and as if I shouldn't look."

"Silly penny stories untrue to life!" Joyce said as an echo of her
father's scorn, but blushing, nevertheless.

"Well, if you don't appreciate your lover, tell him to wait for me. I'll
put up my hair year after next and take him like a shot."

"Of course I appreciate him, or I should not be going to marry him,"
said Joyce with the dignity of eighteen. "But it's folly to make so much
fuss about marriage, seeing that it's the most ordinary thing in life,
like being born, or dying."

"The most incomprehensible thing in life, I should imagine," retorted
Kitty, wide-eyed with curiosity. "Especially when you come to think of
going away for good--or bad, maybe!--with a strange man you know next to
nothing of; and all at a blow, having to share the same apartments with
him. Merciful Providence! I am sure the Queen never did!"

"It's supposed to be the correct thing," said Joyce rather scared.
"Mother says, 'husbands and wives are one,' and 'to the pure, all things
are pure'--whatever that has to do with it--so it would be illogical in
the face of that to object to such a trifle as sharing a room. 'One has
to tune one's mind to accept whatever comes, and to follow in the
footsteps of one's parents,'" she quoted.

"How I wish you were not going right away with him, immediately," sighed
Kitty enviously. "You might so easily have told me all about it. Nobody
tells one anything worth knowing, just as though there was anything to
be ashamed about!"

Joyce made no response for the good reason that her mind was wrestling
with disquietude. However, in spite of so much that was mysterious, even
alarming, she decided, as a prospective bride, to assume the dignity and
reserve she had noticed in others and smile patronisingly on inquisitive
sixteen.

Shortly afterwards she was married, and she accompanied her "strange
man" on their journey to the Unknown, much as a confiding child trusts
itself to the guardianship of a loving nurse; prepared to accept as a
duty whatever path he might require her to tread.

In matters pertaining to sex, Meredith found her little more than a
child; the result