The problem of the trousseau was almost as simple for her as for him.  She had been extravagant and luxurious, had accumulated really unmanageable quantities of clothing of all kinds, far, far more than any woman without a maid could take care of.  The fact that she had not had a maid was in part responsible for this superfluity.  She had neither the time nor the patience for making or for directing the thousand exasperating little repairs that are necessary if a woman with a small wardrobe is always to look well.  So, whenever repairs were necessary, she bought instead; and as she always kept herself fresh and perfect to the smallest detail she had to buy profusely.  As soon as a dress or a hat or a blouse or a parasol, a pair of boots, slippers, stockings, or any of the costly, flimsy, all but unlaunderable underwear she affected, became not quite perfect, she put it aside against that vague day when she should have leisure or inclination for superintending a seamstress.  Within two hours of her decision she had a seamstress in the house, and they and her mother were at work.  There was no necessity to bother about new dresses.  She would soon be putting off black, and she could get in Paris what she would then need.

In the whirlwind of those thirty-six hours, she had not a moment to think of anything but the material side of the wedding—­the preparations for the journey and for the long absence.  She was half an hour late in getting down to the front parlor for the ceremony, and she looked so tired from toil and lack of sleep that Dory in his anxiety about her was all but unconscious that they were going through the supposedly solemn marriage rite.  Looking back on it afterwards, they could remember little about it—­perhaps even less than can the average couple, under our social system which makes a wedding a social function, not a personal rite.  They had once in jesting earnest agreed that they would have the word “obey” left out of the vows; but they forgot this, and neither was conscious of repeating “obey” after the preacher.  Adelaide was thinking of her trunks, was trying to recall the things she felt she must have neglected in the rush; Dory was worrying over her paleness and the heavy circles under her eyes, was fretting about the train—­Del’s tardiness had not been in the calculations.  Even the preacher, infected by the atmosphere of haste, ran over the sentences, hardly waiting for the responses.  Adelaide’s mother was hearing the trunks going down to the van, and was impatient to be where she could superintend—­there was a very important small trunk, full of underclothes, which she was sure they were overlooking.  Arthur was gloomily abstracted, was in fierce combat with the bitter and melancholy thoughts which arose from the contrast he could not but make—­this simple wedding, with Dory Hargrave as her groom, when in other circumstances there would have been such pomp and grandeur.  He and Mary the cook and Ellen the upstairs girl and old Miss Skeffington, generalissimo