If Augustus Gaines thought she was going to ruin her eyes and choke her lungs by wearing unhealthy crepe over her face he thought wrong, she said, and in a few months it was gone and she was as gay as a girl.  She’s what they call a character, Mrs. Gaines is.

I don’t want to be like her, and I don’t expect to do any groaning over leaving Yorkburg.  I want to live with Uncle Parke and Miss Katherine, and I’m going to.  But it’s strange how many happy things hurt.

XV

A REAL WEDDING

It looks as if everybody who knows Miss Katherine wants her to be married from their house.  Her brothers want her to be married from theirs.  Her aunt, Mrs. Powhatan Bloodgood, who lives in Loudon County, and whose husband is as rich as a real lord, begs her to be married in hers; and everybody in Yorkburg—­I mean the coat-of-arms everybodies—­has invited her to have the wedding in their home.

But she just smiles and says no to them all.  Says she is going to be married from her house, which is the Orphan Asylum, though the ceremony will be at the church.  It’s going to be in the morning at twelve o’clock, so they can take the two-o’clock train for Richmond and go on to New York.

Miss Katherine wants it to be quiet, but it can’t be quiet.  There’s nothing on human legs that can use them who won’t be at the church to see that wedding take place.

Everybody has been paying her a lot of attention of late.  It’s real strange what a difference a man makes in a marriage, even if he isn’t noticed much in person at the time.  If he’s rich and prominent, everybody is so pleasant and sociable you’d think they were real intimate.  If he’s just good and poor, few take notice.

When Miss Vickie Toones married Mr. Joe Blake they didn’t get hardly any presents.  They had a lot of dead relations who used to be rich and haughty, but their living ones are as poor as the people they didn’t used to know, and hardly anybody gave them anything handsome.

Miss Katherine’s presents are just amazing, and my eyes are blistered by the shine of them.  I didn’t know before such things were in the world.  People say Uncle Parke has made a lot of money in some mines out West, besides being a doctor, and that he doesn’t have to work.  “But a man who doesn’t work hasn’t any excuse for living,” I heard him tell somebody, and maybe it’s so, though I don’t know.

I don’t know anything these days.  I’m the shape and size of Mary Cary, but I see and hear so many things I never saw and heard before that I’d like to borrow a dog to see if he knows whether I am myself or somebody else.  And another thing I’d like to find out is, How do other people know so much?

Mrs. Philip Creekmore has a cousin whose wife’s brother lives in the same place Uncle Parke does, and Miss Amelia Cokeland wrote out there and found out all about him.  But it doesn’t matter whether she truly knows anything or not.  Miss Webb says she is like those fish scientists.  Give her one bone, and she can tell you all the rest.  She’s had a grand time telling more things about Uncle Parke than Miss Katherine will ever learn in this world.