"But tell her she mustn't bore him," he said, ignoring the rebuke. "Tell her that when it comes to wives, every husband on earth is Mr. F.'s aunt--he 'hates a fool'!"
"Why not tell her yourself?" she said: then she sighed; "why _did_ she do it?"
"She did it," he instructed her, "because the flattery of a boy's lovemaking went to her head. I have an idea that she was hungry for happiness--so it was champagne on an empty stomach. Think of the starvation dullness of living with that Newbolt female, who drops her g's all over the floor! Edith likes her," he added.
"Oh, Edith!" said Edith's mother, with a shrug; "well; if you can explain Eleanor, perhaps you can explain Maurice?"
"_That's_ easy; anything in petticoats will answer as a peg for a man (we are the idealizing sex) to hang his heart on. Then, there's her music--and her pathos. For she is pathetic, Kit?"
But Mary Houghton shook her head: "It is Maurice who is pathetic--my poor Maurice!..."
When they went down to the east porch, with its great white columns, and its broad steps leading into Mrs. Houghton's gay and fragrant garden, they found Edith there before them--sitting on the top step, her arms around her knees, her worshiping eyes fixed on the Bride. Edith had nothing to say; it was enough to look at the "bridal couple," as the kitchen had named them. When her father and mother appeared, she did manage, in the momentary bustle of rising and offering chairs, to say to Maurice:
"Oh, isn't she lovely! Oh, Maurice, let's go out behind the barn after supper and talk! Maurice, _did_ she bring her harp? I want to see her play on it! I saw her wedding ring," she ended, in an ecstatic whisper.
"She doesn't play on the harp; she plays on the piano. Did you twig her hair?" Maurice whispered back; "it's like black down!"
Edith was speechless with adoration; she wished, passionately, that Maurice would put his coat down for the Bride to step on, like Sir Walter Raleigh! "for she is a _Queen_!" Edith thought: then Maurice pulled one of her pigtails and she kicked him--and after that she was forgotten, for the grown people began to talk, and say it had been a hot day, and that the strawberries needed rain--but Eleanor hoped there wouldn't be a thunderstorm.