The wedding ceremony had somehow upset her opinion of him, but Honora regarded this change as temporary.  Julius Caesar or George Washington himself must have been somewhat ridiculous as bridegrooms:  and she had the sense to perceive that her own agitations as a bride were partly responsible.  No matter how much a young girl may have trifled with that electric force in the male sex known as the grand passion, she shrinks from surrendering herself to its dominion.  Honora shrank.  He made love to her on the way to the station, and she was terrified.  He actually forgot to smoke cigarettes.  What he said was to the effect that he possessed at last the most wonderful and beautiful woman in the world, and she resented the implication of possession.

Nevertheless, in the glaring lights of the station, her courage and her pride in him revived, and he became again a normal and a marked man.  Although the sex may resent it, few women are really indifferent to clothes, and Howard’s well-fitting check suit had the magic touch of the metropolis.  His manner matched his garments.  Obsequious porters grasped his pig-skin bag, and seized Honora’s; the man at the gate inclined his head as he examined their tickets, and the Pullman conductor himself showed them their stateroom, and plainly regarded them as important people far from home.  Howard had the cosmopolitan air.  He gave the man a dollar, and remarked that the New Orleans train was not exactly the Chicago and New York Limited.

“Not by a long shot,” agreed the conductor, as he went out, softly closing the door behind him.

Whereupon the cosmopolitan air dropped from Mr. Howard Spence, not gracefully, and he became once more that superfluous and awkward and utterly banal individual, the husband.

“Let’s go out and walk on the platform until the train starts,” suggested Honora, desperately.  “Oh, Howard, the shades are up!  I’m sure I saw some one looking in!”

He laughed.  But there was a light in his eyes that frightened her, and she deemed his laughter out of place.  Was he, after all, an utterly different man than what she had thought him?  Still laughing, he held to her wrist with one hand, and with the other pulled down the shades.

“This is good enough for me,” he said.  “At last—­at last,” he whispered, “all the red tape is over, and I’ve got you to myself!  Do you love me just a little, Honora?”

“Of course I do,” she faltered, still struggling, her face burning as from a fire.

“Then what’s the matter?” he demanded.

“I don’t know—­I want air.  Howard, please let me go.  It’s-it’s so hot inhere.  You must let me go.”

Her release, she felt afterwards, was due less to a physical than a mental effort.  She seemed suddenly to have cowed him, and his resistance became enfeebled.  She broke from him, and opened the door, and reached the cement platform and the cold air.  When he joined her, there was something jokingly apologetic about his manner, and he was smoking a cigarette; and she could not help thinking that she would have respected him more if he had held her.