"Now, dear friends, as I am Mr. Milburn's wife, let us all be
Christians this Sunday night, and drink his health and happy recovery,
and that he may never repent his marriage."
They drank with some hesitation, except the bride, Rhoda, and Mrs.
Dennis. Mrs. Tilghman needed the wine too much to wait long, and Mrs.
Custis, finding she was observed, took a sip from her glass also,
excusing herself on the ground of a recent headache from drinking
heartily.
As the conversation proceeded, now by general participation, again by
couples apart, and Vesta found herself more and more a subject of
sympathy, with no little curiosity interwoven in it, she also imagined
that an undertone of belief was abroad that she had made a mercenary
marriage.
Old Mrs. Tilghman--in her prime a most caustic belle, and worldly as
three marriages, all shrewdly contracted, could make her--seemed
determined to hold that Vesta had rejected her grandson for the
money-lender on the consideration of wealth. Vesta's own mother, too,
who should have known her well, had twice hinted the same. Even the
inoffensive Ellenora had accepted that idea, or another kin to it, and
Rhoda Holland had remembered that her uncle was the richest of
bridegrooms in Princess Anne. Vesta felt the injustice, but said to
herself:
"I must make the sacrifice complete, and incur any harsh judgment it may
bear. I see that I shall be driven for sympathy to the last place in the
world I anticipated: to my husband's heart.
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