Her impressions of this cardinal ceremony were rich and confused, complicated by a quite transitory passion that awakened no reciprocal fire for a fat curly headed cousin in black velveteen and a lace collar, who assisted as a page.  She followed him about persistently, and succeeded, after a brisk, unchivalrous struggle (in which he pinched and asked her to “cheese it"), in kissing him among the raspberries behind the greenhouse.  Afterward her brother Roddy, also strange in velveteen, feeling rather than knowing of this relationship, punched this Adonis’s head.

A marriage in the house proved to be exciting but extremely disorganizing.  Everything seemed designed to unhinge the mind and make the cat wretched.  All the furniture was moved, all the meals were disarranged, and everybody, Ann Veronica included, appeared in new, bright costumes.  She had to wear cream and a brown sash and a short frock and her hair down, and Gwen cream and a brown sash and a long skirt and her hair up.  And her mother, looking unusually alert and hectic, wore cream and brown also, made up in a more complicated manner.

Ann Veronica was much impressed by a mighty trying on and altering and fussing about Alice’s “things”—­Alice was being re-costumed from garret to cellar, with a walking-dress and walking-boots to measure, and a bride’s costume of the most ravishing description, and stockings and such like beyond the dreams of avarice—­and a constant and increasing dripping into the house of irrelevant remarkable objects, such as—­

Real lace bedspread;

Gilt travelling clock;

Ornamental pewter plaque;

Salad bowl (silver mounted) and servers;

Madgett’s “English Poets” (twelve volumes), bound purple morocco;

Etc., etc.

Through all this flutter of novelty there came and went a solicitous, preoccupied, almost depressed figure.  It was Doctor Ralph, formerly the partner of Doctor Stickell in the Avenue, and now with a thriving practice of his own in Wamblesmith.  He had shaved his side-whiskers and come over in flannels, but he was still indisputably the same person who had attended Ann Veronica for the measles and when she swallowed the fish-bone.  But his role was altered, and he was now playing the bridegroom in this remarkable drama.  Alice was going to be Mrs. Ralph.  He came in apologetically; all the old “Well, and how are we?” note gone; and once he asked Ann Veronica, almost furtively,

“How’s Alice getting on, Vee?” Finally, on the Day, he appeared like his old professional self transfigured, in the most beautiful light gray trousers Ann Veronica had ever seen and a new shiny silk hat with a most becoming roll....

It was not simply that all the rooms were rearranged and everybody dressed in unusual fashions, and all the routines of life abolished and put away:  people’s tempers and emotions also seemed strangely disturbed and shifted about.  Her father was distinctly irascible, and disposed more than ever to hide away among the petrological things—­the study was turned out.  At table he carved in a gloomy but resolute manner.  On the Day he had trumpet-like outbreaks of cordiality, varied by a watchful preoccupation.  Gwen and Alice were fantastically friendly, which seemed to annoy him, and Mrs. Stanley was throughout enigmatical, with an anxious eye on her husband and Alice.