There was a confused impression of livery carriages and whips with white favors, people fussily wanting other people to get in before them, and then the church.  People sat in unusual pews, and a wide margin of hassocky emptiness intervened between the ceremony and the walls.

Ann Veronica had a number of fragmentary impressions of Alice strangely transfigured in bridal raiment.  It seemed to make her sister downcast beyond any precedent.  The bridesmaids and pages got rather jumbled in the aisle, and she had an effect of Alice’s white back and sloping shoulders and veiled head receding toward the altar.  In some incomprehensible way that back view made her feel sorry for Alice.  Also she remembered very vividly the smell of orange blossom, and Alice, drooping and spiritless, mumbling responses, facing Doctor Ralph, while the Rev. Edward Bribble stood between them with an open book.  Doctor Ralph looked kind and large, and listened to Alice’s responses as though he was listening to symptoms and thought that on the whole she was progressing favorably.

And afterward her mother and Alice kissed long and clung to each other.  And Doctor Ralph stood by looking considerate.  He and her father shook hands manfully.

Ann Veronica had got quite interested in Mr. Bribble’s rendering of the service—­he had the sort of voice that brings out things—­and was still teeming with ideas about it when finally a wild outburst from the organ made it clear that, whatever snivelling there might be down in the chancel, that excellent wind instrument was, in its Mendelssohnian way, as glad as ever it could be.  “Pump, pump, per-um-pump, Pum, Pump, Per-um....”

The wedding-breakfast was for Ann Veronica a spectacle of the unreal consuming the real; she liked that part very well, until she was carelessly served against her expressed wishes with mayonnaise.  She was caught by an uncle, whose opinion she valued, making faces at Roddy because he had exulted at this.

Of the vast mass of these impressions Ann Veronica could make nothing at the time; there they were—­Fact!  She stored them away in a mind naturally retentive, as a squirrel stores away nuts, for further digestion.  Only one thing emerged with any reasonable clarity in her mind at once, and that was that unless she was saved from drowning by an unmarried man, in which case the ceremony is unavoidable, or totally destitute of under-clothing, and so driven to get a trousseau, in which hardship a trousseau would certainly be “ripping,” marriage was an experience to be strenuously evaded.

When they were going home she asked her mother why she and Gwen and Alice had cried.

“Ssh!” said her mother, and then added, “A little natural feeling, dear.”

“But didn’t Alice want to marry Doctor Ralph?”

“Oh, ssh, Vee!” said her mother, with an evasion as patent as an advertisement board.  “I am sure she will be very happy indeed with Doctor Ralph.”