Gabriella stood in front of the station, ecstatically watching George while he struggled for a cab.  In the pale beams of the early sunshine her face looked young, flushed, and expectant, as if she had just awakened from sleep, and her eyes, following her husband, were the happy eyes of a bride.  She wore a new dress of blue broadcloth, passionately overtrimmed by Miss Polly Hatch; on her head a blue velvet toque from Brandywine’s millinery department rested as lightly as a benediction; and her hands clasped Arthur’s wedding present, a bag of alligator skin bearing her initials in gold.  One blissful month ago she and George had been married, and now, on the reluctant return from a camp in the Adirondacks, they were confronting the disillusioning actuality of the New York streets at eight o’clock in the morning.  While Gabriella waited, shivering a a little, for the air was sharp and her broadcloth dress was not warm, she amused herself planning a future which appeared to consist of inexhaustible happiness.  And mingling with her dreams there were divine memories of the last month and of her marriage.  After that one quarrel George, she told herself, had been “simply perfect.”  His manner to her mother had been beautiful; he had been as eager as Gabriella to obliterate all memory of the difference between them, though, of course, after his yielding that supreme point she had felt that she must give up everything else—­and the giving up had been rapture.  He had shown not the faintest disposition to crow over her when at last, after consulting Mrs. Carr, she had told him that her mother really preferred to stay with Jane until summer, though he had remarked with evident relief:  “Then we’ll put off looking for an apartment.  It’s easier to find one in the summer anyway, and in the meantime you can talk it over with mother.”

After this everything had gone so smoothly, so exquisitely, that it was more like a dream than like actual life when she looked back on it.  She saw herself in the floating lace veil of her grandmother, holding white roses in her hand, and she saw George’s face—­the face of her dreams come true—­looking at her out of a starry mist, while in the shining wilderness that surrounded them she heard an organ playing softly “The Voice That Breathed O’er Eden.”  Then the going away!  The good-byes at the station in Richmond; her mother’s face, pathetic and drawn against the folds of her crape veil; Cousin Jimmy, crimson and jovial; Florrie’s violent waving as the train moved away; Miss Jemima, with her smiling, pain-tortured eyes, flinging a handful of rice; the last glimpse of them; the slowly vanishing streets, where the few pedestrians stopped to look after the cars; the park where she had played as a child; the brilliant flower-beds filled with an autumnal bloom of scarlet cannas; the white-aproned negro nurses and the gaily decorated perambulators; the clustering church spires against a sky of pure azure; the negro hovels, with frost-blighted sunflowers dropping brown seeds over the paling fences; the rosy haze of it all; and her heart saying over and over, “There is nothing but love in the world!  There is nothing but love in the world!”