And Edith, too, welcomed her emancipation. “When I marry you,” she told Delafield, “I am going to break all the rules. In Uncle Fred’s house everything runs by clockwork, and it is he who winds the clock.”
Delafield laughed and kissed her. He was like the rest of the men of his generation, apparently acquiescent. Yet the chances were that when Edith was his wife, he, too, would wind the clock!
Their engagement was one of mutual freedom. Edith did as she pleased, Delafield did as he pleased. They rarely clashed. And as the wedding day approached, they were pleasantly complacent.
Delafield, dictating a letter one day to Frederick Towne’s stenographer, spoke of his complacency. He was writing to Bob Sterling, who was to be his best man, and who shared his apartment in New York. Delafield was an orphan, and had big money interests. He felt that Washington was tame compared to the metropolis. He and Edith were to live one block east of Fifth Avenue, in a house that he had bought for her.
When he was in Washington he occupied a desk in Frederick’s office. Lucy Logan took his dictation. She had been for several years with Towne. She was twenty-three, well-groomed, and self-possessed. She had slender, flexible fingers, and Delafield liked to look at them. She had soft brown hair, and her profile, as she bent over her book, was clear-cut and composed.
“Edith and I are great pals,” he dictated. “I rather think we are going to hit it off famously. I’d hate to have a woman hang around my neck. And I want you for my best man. I know it is asking a lot, but it’s just once in a lifetime, old chap.”
Lucy wrote that and waited with her pencil poised.
“Wait a minute,” Delafield decided. “I want to add a postscript.”
“By the way,” Delafield dictated, “I wish you’d order the flowers at Tolley’s. White orchids for Edith of course. He’ll know the right thing for the bridesmaids--I’ll get Edith to send him the color scheme----”
Lucy’s pencil dashed and dotted. She looked up, hesitated. “Miss Towne doesn’t care for orchids.”
She fluttered the leaves of her notebook and found an order from Towne to a local florist. “He says here, ‘Anything but orchids--she doesn’t like them.’”
“But I’ve been sending her orchids every week.”