They are married and gone, and for two days Twickenham Town has talked of nothing else.  It made a regular soup of the marriage.  The bride and groom were the stock, the grandparent and maiden aunts were the thickening, and I was the seasoning; but all that does not matter now.  The ancestralized person has learned that the twentieth century sees some things clearer than the eighteenth did, but she will never admit that she has learned it.  Taylor and Amy were not unmindful of what was due her, however.  Taylor wrote her a very nice letter, asking her permission to marry her granddaughter and take her to South America, and her answer was low-down.  He wrote as a gentleman should, and she answered as a lady shouldn’t, for her answer was insulting, and a real lady never humiliates any one.  After reading it Taylor told Amy to meet him at seven o’clock on Wednesday morning, and they would be married in the church with no one present but his brother (the only relative Taylor has in town is a bachelor brother), and the sexton, the minister, and me.  She met and the marriage took place.

We didn’t tell a soul about the marriage.  The night before Amy spent with me at Rose Hill, and, thinking it best Taylor should not be there, I told him not to come, and sent the other boys home early.  In my room I packed my suitcase and put in it two dresses I had never worn, which I was glad to do, as it would mean that much less to pack when I went home, and also I put in some other things; and though Amy cried a good deal and didn’t think she ought to take them, she was very particular about how they went in.  She is very neat and careful, and I’m fearfully quick, so it was well she watched me.  I told her she was doing me a favor to dispossess me of what I didn’t want and what was in my way, and as we were the same height, though Amy is a little thinner, owing to secret love and distress of mind, I knew the things would fit her, and I was more than glad to get rid of them.  Also she didn’t have any of her own convenient, and she might as well be sensible.  She was, and put in her own tooth brush and powder and left the rest to me, and by eleven o’clock everything was ready.

When the next day the news flew around that the marriage had taken place and I had been the leading spirit in it, I went to bed and stayed there until the town had finished chewing me up, and then I came out again.  It was the most sensible thing I ever did and saved a lot of talk and argument.

Another reason I went to bed was because I was so homesick and so lonely, and so something I had no name for, that I knew it was wiser to be by myself.  I can’t be much in life, but I can keep from being a nuisance, and when you feel you haven’t a friend on earth outside of your family, who sometimes are queer also, you’re apt to be a trial to those you come in contact with.  For two whole days I stayed in my room and thought of nothing but a big, brawny, domineering, dictating girl from the West who was giving Billy no time to write letters; and though I would die before I would let anybody know it, even Jess, I nearly cried my eyes out under the bedclothes the day of the marriage.