There was nothing to be said on that point.  But there was much talk, during the few days of their stay in New York, about the elaborate preparations for the ceremony.  Morrison, who came to see them in their temporary quarters, kept up a somewhat satirical report as to the magnificence of the performance, and on the one occasion when they went to see Molly they found her flushed, excited, utterly inconsecutive, distracted by a million details, and accepting the situation as the normal one for a bride-to-be.  There were heart-searchings as to toilets to match the grandeur of the occasion; and later satisfaction with the moss-green chiffon for Sylvia and violet-colored velvet for her aunt.  There were consultations about the present Aunt Victoria was to send from them both, a wonderfully expensive, newly patented, leather traveling-case for a car, guaranteed to hold less to the square inch and pound than any other similar, heavy, gold-mounted contrivance.  Mrs. Marshall-Smith told Morrison frankly, in this connection, that she had tried to select a present which Molly herself would enjoy.

“Am I not to have a present myself?” asked Morrison.  “Something that you selected expressly for me?”

“No,” said Sylvia, dropping the sugar into his tea with deliberation.  “You are not to have any present for yourself.”

She was guiltily conscious that she was thinking of a certain scene in “The Golden Bowl,” a scene in which a wedding present figures largely; and when, a moment later, he said, “I have a new volume of Henry James I’d like to loan you,” she knew that the same scene had been in his head.  She would not look at him lest she read in his eyes that he had meant her to know.  As she frequently did in those days, she rose, and making an excuse of a walk in the park, took herself off.

She was quite calm during this period, her mind full of trivial things.  She had the firm conviction that she was living in a dream, that nothing of what was happening was irrevocable.  And besides, as at Lydford, for much of the day, she was absorbed in the material details of her life, being rubbed and dressed and undressed, and adorned and fed and catered to.  They were spending the few days before sailing in a very grand hotel, overlooking Central Park.  Sylvia had almost every day the thought that she herself was now in the center of exactly the same picture in which, as a child, she had enviously watched Aunt Victoria.  She adored every detail of it.  It was an opening-out, even from the Lydford life.  She felt herself expanding like a dried sponge placed in water, to fill every crack and crevice of the luxurious habits of life.  The traveling along that road is always swift; and Sylvia’s feet were never slow.  During the first days in Vermont, it had seemed a magnificence to her that she need never think of dish-washing or bed-making.  By this time it seemed quite natural to her that Helene drew and tempered the water for her bath, and put on her stockings.  Occasionally she noticed with a little surprise that she seemed to have no more free time than in the laborious life of La Chance; but for the most part she threw out, in all haste, innumerable greedy root-tendrils into the surcharged richness of her new soil and sent up a rank growth of easeful acquiescence in redundance.