“Oh, I can hardly wait!” she concluded rapturously.
Young Doc, guiding the car around the street-sprinkling wagon, did not answer. Beyond the wagon, Mr. Hackett, whom the Ford had overtaken, was swinging along. Missy turned to young Doc with a slight grimace.
“'The poor craven bridegroom said never a word,'” she quoted.
Young Doc permitted himself to smile--not too much. “Why don't you like him, Missy?”
Missy shook her head, without other reply. It would have been difficult for her to express why she didn't like stylish Mr. Hackett.
“I wish,” she said suddenly, “that you were going to be the bridegroom, Doc.”
He smiled a wry smile at her. “Well, to tell the truth, I wish so, too, Missy.”
“Well, she'll be coming back to visit us often, and maybe you can take us out riding again.”
“Maybe--but after getting used to big imported cars, I'm afraid one doesn't care much for a Ford.”
There was a note of cynicism, of pain, which, because she didn't know what it was, cut Missy to the heart. It is all very well, in Romance and Poems, to meet with unhappy, discarded lovers--they played an essential part in many of the best ballads in the Anthology; but when that romantic role falls, in real life, on the shoulders of a nice young Doc, the matter assumes a different complexion. Missy's own ecstasy over the Wedding suddenly loomed thoughtless, selfish, wicked. She longed timidly to reach over and pat that lean brown hand resting on the steering-wheel. Two sentences she formed in her mind, only to abandon them unspoken, when, to her relief, the need for delicate diplomacy was temporarily removed by the car's slowing to a stop before Miss Martin's gate.
Inside the little white cottage, however, in Miss Martin's sitting-room--so queer and fascinating with its “forms,” its samples and “trimmings” pinned to the curtains, its alluring display of fashion magazines and “charts,” and its eternal litter of varicoloured scraps over the floor--Missy's momentary dejection could but vanish. Finally, when in Miss Martin's artfully tilted cheval glass, she surveyed the pink vision which was herself, gone, for the time, was everything of sadness in the world. She turned her head this way and that, craning to get the effect from every angle-the bouffance of the skirt, the rosebuds wreathing the sides, the butterfly sash in the back. Adjured by Miss Martin to stand still, she stood vibrantly poised like a lily-stem waiting the breath of the wind; bade to “lift up your arms,” she obeyed and visioned winged fairies alert for flight. Even when Miss Martin, carried away by her zeal in fitting, stuck a pin through the pink tissue clear into the warmer, softer pink beneath, Missy scarcely felt the prick.