This was a marriage high as the firmament over common occurrences, black as Erebus to confound; it involved the wreck of expectations, disastrous eclipse of a sovereign luminary in the splendour of his rise, Phaethon’s descent to the Shades through a smoking and a crackling world.  Asserted here, verified there, the rumour gathered volume, and from a serpent of vapour resolved to sturdy concrete before it was tangible.  Contradiction retired into corners, only to be swept out of them.  For this marriage, abominable to hear of, was of so wonderful a sort, that the story filled the mind, and the discrediting of the story threatened the great world’s cranium with a vacuity yet more monstrously abominable.

For he, the planet Croesus of his time, recently, scarce later than last night, a glorious object of the mid-heavens above the market, has been enveloped, caught, gobbled up by one of the nameless little witches riding after dusk the way of the wind on broomsticks-by one of them!  She caught him like a fly in the hand off a pane of glass, gobbled him with the customary facility of a pecking pullet.

But was the planet Croesus of his time a young man to be so caught, so gobbled?

There is the mystery of it.  On his coming of age, that young man gave sign of his having a city head.  He put his guardians deliberately aside, had his lawyers and bailiffs and stewards thoroughly under control:  managed a particularly difficult step-mother; escaped the snares of her lovely cousin; and drove his team of sycophants exactly the road he chose to go and no other.  He had a will.

The world accounted him wildish?

Always from his own offset, to his own ends.  Never for another’s dictation or beguilement.  Never for a woman.  He was born with a suspicion of the sex.  Poetry decorated women, he said, to lime and drag men in the foulest ruts of prose.

We are to believe he has been effectively captured?

It is positively a marriage; he admits it.

Where celebrated?

There we are at hoodman-blind for the moment.  Three counties claim the church; two ends of London.

She is not a person of society, lineage?

Nor of beauty.  She is a witch; ordinarily petticoated and not squeaking like a shrew-mouse in her flights, but not a whit less a moon-shade witch.  The kind is famous.  Fairy tales and terrible romances tell of her; she is just as much at home in life, and springs usually from the mire to enthral our knightliest.  Is it a popular hero?  She has him, sooner or later.  A planet Croesus?  He falls to her.

That is, if his people fail to attach him in legal bonds to a damsel of a corresponding birth on the day when he is breeched.