ow the names of everybody who
attended from the officiating clergy to the shyest of poor relations.
With the cold accuracy of an encyclopaedia, and with expert technical
discrimination, they mention the various fabrics of which the costumes
of bride and bridesmaids were composed. They catalogue the wedding
presents with the correct names of the donors. They remember what hymns
were sung and who signed the register. They know the spot chosen for the
honeymoon. They know the exact hour of the train by which the happy pair
departed. Their knowledge is astonishing in its detail. Their accounts
naturally lack imagination. Otherwise they would not be faithful records
of fact. But they do lack colour, the magic word that brings a scene
before the eye. Perhaps that is why they are never collected and
published in book form.

Now I have been wondering how to describe the wedding of Doria and
Adrian. I have recourse to Barbara.

"Why, I have the very thing for you," she says, and runs away and
presently reappears with a long thing like a paper snake. "This is a
full report of the wedding. I kept it. I felt it might come in useful
some day," she cried in triumph. "You can stick it in bodily."

I began to read in hope the column of precise information. I end it in
despair. It leaves me admiring but cold. It fails to conjure up to my
mind the picture of a single mortal thing. Sadly I hand it back to
Barbara.

"I shan't describe the wedding at all," I say.

And indeed why should I? Our young friends were married as legally and
irrevocably as half a dozen parsons in the presence of a distinguished
congregation assembled in a fashionable London church could marry them.
Of what actually took place I have the confused memory of the mere man.
I know that it was magnificent. All the dinner parties of Mr. Jornicroft
were splendidly united. Adrian's troops of friends supported him. Doria,
dark eyed, without a tinge of colour in the strange ivory of her cheek,
looked more elfin than ever beneath the white veil. Jaffery, who was
best man, vast in a loose frock coat, loomed like a monstrous effigy by
the altar-rails. Susan, at the head of the bridesmaids, kept the stern
set face of one at grapple with awful responsibility. She told her
mother afterwards that a pin was running into her all the time. . . .
Well, I, for one, signed the register and I kissed the bride and shook
hands with Adrian, who adopted the poor nonchalant attitude of one