“Sure, Miss Mary,” cried Catherine, “it’s always the great lady she was, and she a wee bit of a thing.  And wasn’t it yerself, Miss Mary, that dressed her like a princess?”

Then came the good-bys—­the real ones.  Uncle Tom, always the friend of young people, was surrounded by a group of bridesmaids in the hall.  She clung to him.  And Peter, who had the carriage ready.  What would her wedding have been without Peter?  As they drove towards the station, his was the image that remained persistently in her mind, bareheaded on the sidewalk in the light of the carriage lamps.  The image of struggle.

She had married Prosperity.  A whimsical question, that shocked her, irresistibly presented itself:  was it not Prosperity that she had promised to love, honour, and obey?

It must not be thought that Honora was by any means discontented with her Prosperity.  He was new—­that was all.  Howard looked new.  But she remembered that he had always looked new; such was one of his greatest charms.  In the long summer days since she had bade him good-by on her way through New York from Silverdale, Honora had constructed him:  he was perpetual yet sophisticated Youth; he was Finance and Fashion; he was Power in correctly cut clothes.  And when he had arrived in St. Louis to play his part in the wedding festivities, she had found her swan a swan indeed—­he was all that she had dreamed of him.  And she had tingled with pride as she introduced him to her friends, or gazed at him across the flower-laden table as he sat beside Edith Hanbury at the bridesmaids’ dinner in Wayland Square.

The wedding ceremony had somehow upset her opinion of him, but Honora regarded this change as temporary.  Julius Caesar or George Washington himself must have been somewhat ridiculous as bridegrooms:  and she had the sense to perceive that her own agitations as a bride were partly responsible.  No matter how much a young girl may have trifled with that electric force in the male sex known as the grand passion, she shrinks from surrendering herself to its dominion.  Honora shrank.  He made love to her on the way to the station, and she was terrified.  He actually forgot to smoke cigarettes.  What he said was to the effect that he possessed at last the most wonderful and beautiful woman in the world, and she resented the implication of possession.

Nevertheless, in the glaring lights of the station, her courage and her pride in him revived, and he became again a normal and a marked man.  Although the sex may resent it, few women are really indifferent to clothes, and Howard’s well-fitting check suit had the magic touch of the metropolis.  His manner matched his garments.  Obsequious porters grasped his pig-skin bag, and seized Honora’s; the man at the gate inclined his head as he examined their tickets, and the Pullman conductor himself showed them their stateroom, and plainly regarded them as important people far from home.  Howard had the cosmopolitan air.  He gave the man a dollar, and remarked that the New Orleans train was not exactly the Chicago and New York Limited.