Sixth Young Man: They say they love ’em. My dentist told me once a woman came to him and insisted on having two of her teeth covered with gold. No reason at all. All right the way they were.
Fourth Young Man: Hear you got out a book, Dicky. ‘Gratulations!
Dick: (Stiffly) Thanks.
Fourth Young Man: (Innocently) What is it? College stories?
Dick: (More stiffly) No. Not college stories.
Fourth Young Man: Pity! Hasn’t been a good book about Harvard for years.
Dick: (Touchily) Why don’t you supply the lack?
Third Young Man: I think I saw a squad of guests turn the drive in a Packard just now.
Sixth Young Man: Might open a couple more bottles on the strength of that.
Third Young Man: It was the shock of my life when I heard the old man was going to have a wet wedding. Rabid prohibitionist, you know.
Fourth Young Man: (Snapping his fingers excitedly) By gad! I knew I’d forgotten something. Kept thinking it was my vest.
Dick: What was it?
Fourth Young Man: By gad! By gad!
Sixth Young Man: Here! Here! Why the tragedy?
Second Young Man: What’d you forget? The way home?
Dick: (Maliciously) He forgot the plot for his book of Harvard stories.
Fourth Young Man: No, sir, I forgot the present, by George! I forgot to buy old Anthony a present. I kept putting it off and putting it off, and by gad I’ve forgotten it! What’ll they think?
Sixth Young Man: (Facetiously) That’s probably what’s been holding up the wedding.
(The Fourth Young Man looks nervously at his watch. Laughter.)
Fourth Young Man: By gad! What an ass I am!
Second Young Man: What d’you make of the bridesmaid who thinks she’s Nora Bayes? Kept telling me she wished this was a ragtime wedding. Name’s Haines or Hampton.
Dick: (Hurriedly spurring his imagination) Kane, you mean, Muriel Kane. She’s a sort of debt of honor, I believe. Once saved Gloria from drowning, or something of the sort.
Second Young Man: I didn’t think she could stop that perpetual swaying long enough to swim. Fill up my glass, will you? Old man and I had a long talk about the weather just now.
Maury: Who? Old Adam?
Second Young Man: No, the bride’s father. He must be with a weather bureau.
Dick: He’s my uncle, Otis.
Otis: Well, it’s an honorable profession. (Laughter.)
Sixth Young Man: Bride your cousin, isn’t she?
Dick: Yes, Cable, she is.
Cable: She certainly is a beauty. Not like you, Dicky. Bet she brings old Anthony to terms.
Maury: Why are all grooms given the title of “old”? I think marriage is an error of youth.
Dick: Maury, the professional cynic.
Maury: Why, you intellectual faker!
Fifth Young Man: Battle of the highbrows here, Otis. Pick up what crumbs you can.
Dick: Faker yourself! What do you know?
Maury: What do you know?
Lick: Ask me anything. Any branch of knowledge.
Maury: All right. What’s the fundamental principle of biology?
Dick: You don’t know yourself.
Maury: Don’t hedge!
Dick: Well, natural selection?
Maury: Wrong.
Dick: I give it up.
Maury: Ontogony recapitulates phyllogony.
Fifth Young Man: Take your base!
Maury: Ask you another. What’s the influence of mice on the clover crop? (Laughter.)
Fourth Young Man: What’s the influence of rats on the Decalogue?
Maury: Shut up, you saphead. There is a connection.
Dick: What is it then?
Maury: (Pausing a moment in growing disconcertion) Why, let’s see. I seem to have forgotten exactly. Something about the bees eating the clover.
Fourth Young Man: And the clover eating the mice! Haw! Haw!
Maury: (Frowning) Let me just think a minute.
Dick: (Sitting up suddenly) Listen!
(A volley of chatter explodes in the adjoining room. The six young men arise, feeling at their neckties.)
Dick: (Weightily) We’d better join the firing squad. They’re going to take the picture, I guess. No, that’s afterward.
Otis: Cable, you take the ragtime bridesmaid.
Fourth Young Man: I wish to God I’d sent that present.
Maury: If you’ll give me another minute I’ll think of that about the mice.
Otis: I was usher last month for old Charlie McIntyre and—
(They move slowly toward the door as the chatter becomes a babel and the practising preliminary to the overture issues in long pious groans from Adam Patch’s organ.)
Anthony.
There were five hundred eyes boring through the back of his cutaway and the sun glinting on the clergyman’s inappropriately bourgeois teeth. With difficulty he restrained a laugh. Gloria was saying something in a clear proud voice and he tried to think that the affair was irrevocable, that every second was significant, that his life was being slashed into two periods and that the face of the world was changing before him. He tried to recapture that ecstatic sensation of ten weeks before. All these emotions eluded him, he did not even feel the physical nervousness of that very morning—it was all one gigantic aftermath. And those gold teeth! He wondered if the clergyman were married; he wondered perversely if a clergyman could perform his own marriage service….
But as he took Gloria into his arms he was conscious of a strong reaction. The blood was moving in his veins now. A languorous and pleasant content settled like a weight upon him, bringing responsibility and possession. He was married.
Gloria.
So many, such mingled emotions, that no one of them was separable from the others! She could have wept for her mother, who was crying quietly back there ten feet and for the loveliness of the June sunlight flooding in at the windows. She was beyond all conscious perceptions. Only a sense, colored with delirious wild excitement, that the ultimately important was happening—and a trust, fierce and passionate, burning in her like a prayer, that in a moment she would be forever and securely safe.
Late one night they arrived in Santa Barbara, where the night clerk at the Hotel Lafcadio refused to admit them, on the grounds that they were not married.
The clerk thought that Gloria was beautiful. He did not think that anything so beautiful as Gloria could be