glass. . . . Into something better than either glass or gold." . . .
And for all that evening I wooed her and kept her glad. She made me repeat my assurances over again and still doubted a little.
We furnished that double-fronted house from attic—it ran to an attic—to cellar, and created a garden.
"Do you know Pampas Grass?" said Marion, "I love Pampas Grass . . . if there is room."
"You shall have Pampas Grass," I declared.
And there were moments as we went in imagination about that house together, when my whole being cried out to take her in my arms—now. But I refrained. On that aspect of life I touched very lightly in that talk, very lightly because I had had my lessons.
She promised to marry me within two months' time. Shyly, reluctantly, she named a day, and next afternoon, in heat and wrath, we "broke it off" again for the last time. We split upon procedure. I refused flatly to have a normal wedding with wedding cake, white favours, carriages and the rest of it. It dawned upon me suddenly in conversation with her and her mother, that this was implied. I blurted out my objection forthwith, and this time it wasn't any ordinary difference of opinion; it was a "row." I don't remember a quarter of the things we flung out in that dispute. I remember her mother reiterating in tones of gentle remonstrance: "But George dear, you must have a cake—to send round." I think we all reiterated things. I seem to remember a refrain of my own: "A marriage is too sacred a thing, too private a thing, for this display." Her father came in and stood behind me against the wall, and her aunt appeared beside the sideboard and stood with folded arms, looking from
