daily columns about him and his romantic career and
his romantic wooing of the New Jersey girl of excellent family and
social position but of comparatively modest means. The shopkeepers gave
interviews on the trousseau. The decorators and caterers detailed the
splendors and the costliness of the preparations of which they had
charge. From morning until dark a crowd hung round the house at Hanging
Rock, and on the wedding day the streets leading to it were
blocked--chiefly with people come from a distance, many of them from
New York.

At the outset all this noise was deeply distasteful to Mildred, but
after a few days she recovered her normal point of view, forgot the
kind of man she was marrying in the excitement and exultation over her
sudden splendor and fame. So strongly did the delusion presently
become, that she was looking at the little general with anything but
unfavorable eyes. He seemed to her a quaint, fascinating, benevolent
necromancer, having miraculous powers which he was exercising in her
behalf. She even reproached herself with ingratitude in not being
wildly in love with him. Would not any other girl, in her place, have
fallen over ears in love with this marvelous man?

However, while she could not quite convince herself that she loved, she
became convinced without effort that she was happy, that she was going
to be still happier. The excitement wrought her into a state of
exaltation and swept her through the wedding ceremony and the going
away as radiant a bride as a man would care to have.

There is much to be said against the noisy, showy wedding. Certainly
love has rarely been known to degrade himself to the point of attending
any such. But there is something to be said for that sort of married
start--for instance, where love is neither invited nor desired, an
effort must be made to cover the painful vacancy his absence always
causes.

The little general's insistence on a "real wedding" was most happy for
him. It probably got him his bride.

III

THE intoxication of that wedding held on long enough and strongly
enough to soften and blunt the disillusionments of the first few days
of the honeymoon. In the prospect that period had seemed, even to
Mildred's rather unsophisticated imagination, appalling beyond her
power to endure. In the fact--thanks in large part to that
intoxication--it was certainly not unendurable. A human being, even an
innocent young girl, can usually bear u