“Oh, sure enough,” said Charlotte, “I do remember, dear.”

“There are really very few indeed in a place like Banbridge whom it is possible to invite to a wedding,” said Mrs. Carroll.

Banbridge itself shared her opinion.  Those who were bidden to the wedding acquiesced in their selectedness and worthiness; those who were not bidden, with a very few exceptions of unduly aspiring souls, acquiesced calmly in their own ineligibility.  Banbridge, for a village in the heart of a republic, had a curious rigidity of establishment and content as to its social conditions.  For the most part those who were not invited would have been embarrassed and even suspicious at receiving invitations.  But they talked.  In that they showed their inalienable republican freedom.  They moved along as unquestioningly as European peasants, in their grooves, but their tongues soared.  In speech, as is the way with an American, they held nothing sacred, not even the institutions which they propped, not even themselves.  They might remain unquestioningly, even preferredly, outside the doors of superiority, but out there they raised a clamor of self-assertion.  Their tongues wagged with prodigious activity utterly unleashed.  In the days before Ina Carroll’s wedding all Banbridge seethed and boiled like a pot with gossip, and gossip full of malice and sneer, and a good deal of righteous indignation.  Anderson heard much of it.  Neither he nor his mother was asked to the wedding.  The Carrolls had not even considered the possibility of such a thing.  Mrs. Anderson spoke of it one evening at tea.

“I hear they are going to have quite a wedding at those new people’s,” said she; “a wedding in the church, and reception afterwards at the house.  Miss Josie Eggleston and Agnes and Mrs. Monroe were in here this afternoon, and they were speaking about it.  They said the young lady was having her trousseau made at Mrs. Griggs’s, and everybody thought it rather singular.  They are going to the wedding and reception.  They inquired if we were going, and I said that we had not been invited, that we had not called.  I have been intending to call ever since they came, but now, of course, it is out of the question until after the wedding.”  Mrs. Anderson spoke with a slight regret.  A mild curiosity was a marked trait of hers.  “I suppose we could go to the church even if we had no invitation; I suppose many will do that,” she said, a little wistfully, after a pause.

“Do you think it wise, without an invitation?” asked Anderson, rather amusedly.

“Why, I don’t know, really, dear, that it could do any harm—­that is, lower one’s dignity at all.  Of course it is not as if we had called.  If we had called and then received no invitation, the slight would have been marked.  But of course we were not invited simply because we had not called—­”

“Still, I think I should rather not go, under the circumstances, mother,” Anderson said, quietly.