had a joke for Bella and a greeting for Clover, no matter how busy and distracted he became, thought Flora, as her tinkling accompaniment flowed without ceasing, as the girls sang on. She had a constant feeling, lately, of holding her breath.
Milk, Honey, Cream
Mayhew sat on the window-ledge with the light behind him, intending to listen critically; but he became fascinated by the three mouths moving at the same time, the shape of their mouths so much the same although their faces differed. When all three sang together, it was richer, deeper—a surprise that three young sylphs like these could produce that tone. Gentry Fox, that training showed. Their bird-waists and the small cages of their ribs, and then the pleasure of pretty girls’ profiles: milk-pale skin on Clover, warm honey on Bella, full cream on Aurora.
Mayhew found himself pitifully aroused by her, and wished it were not so. He thought for a moment of the Irish girl they had found lying in the snow.
The complications of his business interests were extreme, but would be solvable without this baggage. The mirror over the piano showed him the backs of their heads, the coils and rolls they had pinned carefully into each others’ coiffure. They were darlings, and he was as happy as he’d ever been, in fact. And they would help with the Starland, no question.
Oughtn’t to have handed Aurora so much of the roll, though.
‘I’m off,’ he murmured, in the middle of verse two. He grabbed his hat and was out the door before the piano’s notes had ebbed away.
A Sudden Fall of Snow
On the night before the wedding it snowed. Silent, constant, nickel-sized snowflakes fell all night, in no wind, and in the morning when Clover awoke the light in the room was blue.
Mama gasped when Clover pulled open the curtain to show snow heaped halfway up the window. Snow covered the entire landscape like fondant on a wedding cake, smoothing definition of curbs and corners. The street was deserted, and snow was still falling, fifteen inches already on the ground—late May, and the worst blizzard of the year. A shell of ice waited on the water jug.
Clover’s first feeling was relief. We’ll never get there, she thought. Now they can’t be married. Bella had jumped out of the blankets and come to join Clover at the window. She said out loud: ‘Aurora! A blizzard has come—you’ll miss your wedding!’
But Mrs. Hillier knocked on their door soon afterwards with an offer from her son to take them to the Palliser in the draycart. His big horse Clem had famously got through to the train station in the worst storm of 1910, and Hillier was itching to match the feat today.
The girls and Mama spent the morning washing and putting up their hair; in the afternoon they dressed in their wedding clothes—and all the time the snow fell.
The draycart’s wheels shrieked and the snow squealed as they lurched along, but it was a pretty drive, through slow-falling flakes that dazzled in occasional spears of sun. Mama raised her white lawn parasol to shield Aurora’s veil. When the wedding party disembarked at the Grain Exchange building, where the justice of the peace had his office, it was to silence. No streetcars were running, no carriages or cars rolled through the streets.
The Grain Exchange lobby was icy cold—no furnaceman had come to make the furnaces up. They left their galoshes by the door and climbed the stone stairs to the third floor, and there was Mayhew waiting in the hall, as if nothing were amiss with the world.
Bella and Clover were ahead, climbing the stairs, but they parted and let Aurora go through, and Clover was touched to see how Mayhew’s face changed and steadied when he saw his bride.
The justice of the peace, a hardy man who laughed at the thought of a little snow keeping him from his work, dispensed the marriage proper within three minutes; it was little more than a quick ‘Any reason they cannot be joined?’ and a stamp, and signatures.
Mama shed a crystal tear, but at Clover’s nudge and Aurora’s impatient glance, she caught it in a lace hanky and put it tidily away. Then the party trooped down two flights of stairs (the elevator, like the furnace, being out of commission due to the storm), cut cater-corner across the deserted, snow-blown street and up more stairs into the Palliser lobby.
Nobody waited there but one greatcoated major domo, and one stick-thin bellhop in a hat