"It is good to love him!" she had said--"I am happy to love him. I wish only to serve him!"
This was primitive passion,--the passion of primitive woman for her mate whom she admitted to be stronger than herself, to whom she instinctively looked for shelter and protection, and round whose commanding force she sought to rear the lovely fabric of "Home,"--a state of feeling as far removed from the sentiments of modern women as the constellation of Orion is removed from earth. And Sam Gwent's fragmentary reflections flitting through his brain were more serious--one might say more romantic, than the consideration of dollars, which usually occupied all his faculties. He had always thought that there was a good deal in life which he had missed somehow, and which dollars could not purchase; and a certain irate contempt filled him for the man who, unlike himself, was in the prime of strength, and who, with all the glories of Nature about him and the love and beauty of an exquisite womanhood at his hand for possession, could nevertheless devote his energies to the science of destruction and the compassing of death without compunction, on the lines Roger Seaton had laid down as the remedy against all war.
"The kindest thing to think of him is that he's not quite sane,"--Gwent mused--"He has been obsessed by the horrible carnage of the Great War, and disgusted by the utter inefficiency of Governments since the armistice, and this appalling invention of his is the result."
The crashing chords of the Bridal March from "Lohengrin" put an end to his thoughts for the moment,--people began to crush and push out of church, or stand back on each other's toes to stare at the bride's diamonds as she moved very slowly and gracefully down the aisle on the arm of her elderly husband. She certainly looked very well,--and her smile suggested entire satisfaction with herself and the world. Press-camera men clambered about wherever they could find a footing, to catch and perpetuate that smile, which when enlarged and reproduced in newspapers would depict the grinning dental display so much associated with Woodrow Wilson and the Prince of Wales,--though more suggestive of a skull than anything else.
Skulls invariably show their teeth, we know--but it has been left to the modern press-camera man to insist on the death-grin in faces that yet live. The crowd outside the church was far denser than the crowd within, and the fighting and scrambling for points of view became terrific, especially when the wedding guests' motor-cars began to make their way, with sundry hoots and snorts, through the densely packed mob. Women screamed,--some fainted--but none thought of giving way to others, or retiring from the wild scene of contest. Gwent judged it wisest to remain within the church portal till the crowd should clear, and there, safely ensconced, he watched the maddened mass of foolish sight-seers, all of whom had plainly left their daily avocations merely to stare at a man and woman wedded, with whom, personally, they had nothing whatever to do.