My Dear Cornelia/Book 2/Chapter 1
There was a wedding at noon in the village church, a couple of miles from our summer community by the lake, and as most of our colony were somewhat interested in the girl, we turned out in force. It was an outwardly festive and—to my sense—agreeably solemn little affair. There was a bank of lady's-slippers and maidenhair ferns before the altar, and the air was heavy with the sweetly mortal scent of lilies. The clergyman in white vestments had a full consciousness of the finality of his function. He joined in permanent wedlock a white, smiling, tearful bride of twenty to a well-dressed groom of thirty-five, who looked very experienced, very serious, and slightly bald. Cornelia, who is a connoisseur, whispered to me that it was in every respect a "most suitable match." I made a mental note to ask her at the next opportunity what the essentials of a suitable match were. I happened, however, to ride away from the ceremony in the rear seat of her car, sandwiched between her two children, Dorothy and Oliver Junior; and their comment was less flattering.
"Bah!" exclaimed Oliver. "Let's go and have a swim. It made me sick."
"Me too," said Dorothy. "It made me cold all over to hear her promising to forsake all others and keep herself only for that wizened—stick. Why should she forsake all others, just because she is married? It sounds as if she were going as missionary to the Indians."
"Or as trained nurse to an isolation hospital," Oliver suggested.
"When I am married," said Dorothy, "I shall not forsake all others—at least, unless I get a better one than that."
"You are severe critics," I murmured, secretly delighted to observe that the children were using the dialect of their feelings, rather than that polite language which well-bred youth, like Japanese ladies, employ in presence of their elders. "At what age do you expect to be married, Dorothy?"
"I shall never marry!" she replied with a deep blush. She is of course at exactly the correct age for saying that. But if you haven't seen her, you can have no adequate notion how dire and how delicious that threat is on her lips. She inherits "eligibility" from both her parents. Her mother has a clear, expressive, sunlit loveliness; but Dorothy's beauty has in it an element of subtlety—from her father—and a suggestion of sorcery and peril. She has her mother's complexion but her father's eyes. It is the unexpected combination and contrast that fascinates one: the filleted blond hair and the fluent roses of the fair skin, with the brown eyes, dark yet full of lambent lights—eyes of which the centres seem gleaming paths, leading into shadows where a man might easily wander and be lost.
"And why won't you marry?" I pursued; for as we were driving at a good speed over a rough road, I was sure the watchful maternal ears could not overhear us. And so was Dorothy.
"Oh, I don't like the choice," she said, "that marriage presents—nowadays."
"A choice!" I repeated with irreverent levity. "You haven't come to that yet, I trust. But what do you think the choice is going to be?"
"You may laugh," said Dorothy, "but we all know well enough. We don't have to wait till we have made it, to know what the choice is. It is either a 'good American husband,' ten or twenty years older than you, who has a fine position and a character and nice middle-aged friends, and can give you a home and a social circle and clothes and things—but hasn't anything to say to you. He simply hasn't anything to say to you."
"Why do you keep hollering, 'He hasn't anything to say to you'?" mocked her brother. "Who hasn't anything to say? Who? Who? Who?"
"Shut up!" said Dorothy, with more sweetness than the words can carry. "You heard. I said, 'The good American husband has nothing to say to you.'"
"That is rather a defect," I assented wickedly, "if you've got to be alone with him for the rest of your life. Yes, it's a rather serious defect in a man with whom, forsaking all others, a girl of twenty expects to spend the next fifty years. But Dorothy, if you don't take a good American husband, what is the alternative?"
"Oh, a boy of your own age, of course," she answered promptly. "A boy that you like—like in all ways, I mean: like his voice, like his eyes, like the temperature of his hands—not like fins. He talks with you about the things that interest you—they are just the same as the things that interest him; and you like to do things with him; and if there is anything perfectly splendid, you wish he were there; and whenever you see him coming, your heart begins to dance."
"Well," I said, "that seems an attractive sketch. Why not choose a boy like that?"
"Because," she explained, "it seems as if nowadays none of the boys that one really likes is ever going to amount to much. At any rate, you must wait till your doddering old age before you can hope to be married—and what's the use then? He won't be interesting to me, and I won't be nice for him—then. But we'll just sit around in padded chairs, with ear-trumpets in our ears, and yell, 'Whadye say?' at each other; and wish it were bedtime."
"I don't quite understand the reason for this postponement."
"If," she said, "they are boys of your own age, and enjoy the books and music that you do, and are nice to dance with, why, then they think they are going to be poets or composers, and so they don't work, and they flunk out of school—and your mother asks you why you persist in playing around with 'that worthless fellow'—doesn't she, Oliver?"
"Yep!" said her brother, and grinned.
Dorothy, leaning across my knees, first pinched, then patted him, and said: "Poor old Ollie! He's nicer than almost any boy I know, and yet Dad says he's a 'worthless fellow,' too."
When I suggested that the only hope was to take one of these nice worthless fellows and put some "starch" into him, the rear seat burst into a peal of conspirant laughter. Possibly that hope had been tried. Cornelia whirled around upon us, and demanded:—
"What are you children talking about?"
I answered sedately that we were discussing education for life, and that there were certain points on which I should like her opinion. But we were now at the clump of Rural Free Delivery boxes, where the path comes down from my cottage. Intimating that I might "drop around" toward the end of the afternoon, I got out, and having handed up Cornelia's mail, walked home with my own. It proved rather piquantly amusing.