“There’s going to be a regular epidemic of love affairs in Hillsboro, I do believe,” she continued in her usual strain of sentimental speculation.  “I saw Mr. Graves talking to Delia Hawes in front of the draper’s an hour ago, as I came out from looking at the blue chintz to match Pet for the west wing, and they were both so absorbed they didn’t even see me.  That was what might have been called a conflagration dinner you gave the other night, Molly, in more ways than one.  I wish a spark had set off Benton Wade and Henrietta, too.  Maybe it did, but is just taking fire slowly.”

I think it would be a good thing just to let Aunt Bettie blindfold every unmarried person in this town and marry them to the first person they touch hands with.  It would be fun for her, and then we could have peace and apparently as much happiness as we are going to have anyway.  Mrs. Johnson seemed to be in somewhat the same state of mind as I found myself.

“Humph,” she said as we went up the front steps, “I’ll be glad when you are married and settled, Molly Carter, so the rest of this town can quiet down into peace once more, and I sincerely hope every woman under fifty in Hillsboro who is already married will stay in that state until she reaches that age.  But come on in, both of you, and help me get this marriage feast ready, if I must!  The day is going by on greased wheels, and I can’t let Mr. Johnson’s crotchets be neglected, Alfred or no Alfred.”

And from then on for hours and hours I was strapped to a torture wheel that turned and turned, minute after minute, as it ground spice and sugar and bridal meats and me relentlessly into a great suffering pulp.  Could I ever in all my life have hungered for food and been able to get it past the lump in my throat that grew larger with the seconds?  And if Alfred’s pudding tasted of the salt of Dead Sea fruit this evening, it was from my surreptitious tears that dripped into it.

It was late, very late, before Mrs. Johnson realised it and shooed me home to get ready to go to the train along with the brass band and all the other welcomes.

I hurried all I could, but for long minutes I stood in front of my mirror and questioned myself.  Could this slow, pale, dead-eyed, slim, drooping girl be the rollicking girl of a Molly who had looked out of that mirror at me one short week ago?  Where were the wings on her heels, the glint in her curls, the laugh on her mouth, and the light in her eyes?

Slowly at last I lifted the blue muslin, twenty-three-inch waist shroud and let it slip over my head and fall slimly around me.  I was fastening the buttons behind and was fumbling the next one into the buttonhole when I suddenly heard laughing excited voices coming up the side street that ran just under my west window.  Something told me that Alfred had come by the five-down train instead of the six-up, and I fairly reeled to the window and peeped through the venetian blind.