“Yes, we tried to have it quiet,” responded Jimmie, “and we planned it so the taxi would just make our train; but the fellows caught on and were waiting for us at the station, full force, with their pocketfuls of rice and shoes.  They hardly let us get aboard.”

“Gracious!” exclaimed Annabel.  “You might as well have been married in church.  You’d have looked pretty in a train and veil,” she said, addressing Geraldine, who was seated on her right.  “Not but what you don’t look nice in gray.  And I like your suit real well; it’s a fine piece of goods; the kind to stand the desert dust.  But I would have liked to see you in white, with a blaze of lights and decorations and a crowd.”

Geraldine laughed.  “We had a nice little wedding, and the young men from the office made up for their noise.  They gave the porter a handsome case of silver at the last moment, to bring to me.”

“And,” supplemented Jimmie, “there was a handsome silver tea service from the chief.  He told her she had been a credit to the staff, and he would find it hard to replace her.  Think of that coming from the head of a big daily.  It makes me feel guilty.  But she is to have full latitude in the new paper; society, clubs, equal suffrage if she says so; anything she writes goes with the Weatherbee Record.”

“If I were you, I’d have that down in writing.”  Annabel looked from Daniels to the bride, and her lip curled whimsically.  “They all talk that way at first, as though the earth turned round for one woman, and the whole crowd ought to stop to watch her go by.  He pretends, so far as he is concerned, she can stump the county for prohibition or lead the suffragette parade, but, afterwards, he gets to taking the other view.  Instead of thanking his lucky stars the nicest girl in the world picked him out of the bunch, he begins to think she naturally was proud that the best one wanted her.  Then, before they’ve been married two years, he starts trying to make her over into some other kind of a woman.  Why, I know one man right here in Hesperides Vale who set to making a Garden of Eden out of a sandhole in the mountains, just because it belonged to a certain girl.”  She paused an instant, while her glance moved to Banks, and the irony went out of her voice.  “He could have bought the finest fruit ranch in the valley, all under irrigation and coming into bearing, for he had the money, but he went to wasting it on that piece of unreclaimed sage desert.  And now that he has got it all in shape, he’s talking of opening a big farm in Alaska.”

Banks laughed uneasily.  “The boys need it up there,” he said in his high key.  “Besides, I always get more fun out of making new ground over.  It’s such mighty good soil here in Hesperides Vale things grow themselves soon’s the water is turned on.  It don’t leave a man enough to do.  And we could take a little run down to the ranch, any time; we could count on always wintering here, my, yes.”