Meredith. And then she had made the rounds and fed everything; and
now a certain lethargy and stupor of food quieted all creatures and
gave to the valley the dignity of a vocal solitude.
The botanist bride was not in the least abashed during the
ceremony. Nor proud: Mrs. Meredith more gratefully noticed this.
And she watched closely and discovered with relief that Pansy did
not once glance at her with uneasiness or for approval. The mother
looked at Dent with eyes growing dim. "She will never seem to be
the wife of my son," she said, "but she will make her children look
like his children."
And so it was all over and they were gone--slipped away through the
hiding white mists without a doubt of themselves, without a doubt
of each other, mating as naturally as the wild creatures who never
know the problems of human selection, or the problems that
civilization leaves to be settled after selection has been made.
Mrs. Meredith and Rowan and the clergyman were left with the father
and the children, and with an unexampled wedding collation--one of
Pansy's underived masterpieces. The clergyman frightened the
younger children; they had never seen his like either with respect
to his professional robes or his superhuman clerical voice--their
imaginations balancing unsteadily between the impossibility of his
being a man in a nightgown and the impossibility of his being a
woman with a mustache.
After his departure their fright and apprehensions settled on Mrs.
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