"I know she is. Poor Sally! And she might have been like me, with everything heart can wish for! Mother says she was a finer baby than I – beautifully formed and healthy; but she had an accident that hurt her back – a fall. And so all the sweetness of life has been taken from her, while I – I am overwhelmed with it."
"Not all," said Tony. "We shall make her happy between us."
"If she can't have this," said Jenny, pressing his arm, "she can't know what happiness means."
He drew the warm hand up, and kissed the tips of her fingers, on which gloves were never allowed on these occasions.
"I foresee," he said gravely, "that I shall have to beat you and refuse to give you money for new bonnets, to make you realise that your little feet are standing on the earth, Jenny, and not on the clouds of heaven."
They were married in February, that they might have a quiet month before sailing in March. Mrs. Rogerson wanted to undertake the wedding, but was politely informed that there was to be no wedding; and there was none in her sense. Jenny went out for a walk with her mother and sister, and Anthony went out for a walk with Adam Danesbury; old Mr. Churchill and his daughter Mary, who happened to be staying with him, took a hansom from the office, Joey having been released from his desk therein; and these people met together for a few minutes, transacted their business briefly, and adjourned to the Café Anglais for lunch; after which the bride and bridegroom, being already dressed for travel, with their baggage at the station, fared forth into the wide world.
Thus ended the tea-room enterprise.
And I don't know whether the moral of Jenny's story is bad or good. It depends on the point of view. Virtue, of course, ought to be its own reward – at any rate, it should seek no other; and there are people who think a husband no reward at all, under any circumstances, but quite the contrary. For myself, I regard a rich marriage as rather a vulgar sort of thing, and by no means the proper goal of a good girl's ambitions. Also, however well a marriage may begin, nobody can foretell how it will eventually turn out. It is a matter of a thousand compromises, take it at its best, and all we can say of it is that there is nothing above it in the scale of human satisfactions.
That I will maintain as beyond a doubt, because it is the dictum of nature, who is the mother of all wisdom. She says that even an unlucky marriage, which is a living martyrdom, is better than none, but that a marriage like that which arose out of Jenny's tea-room is a door to the sanctuary of the temple of life, never opened to the undeserving – the nearest approach to happiness that has been discovered at present. Yes – although, without beating her or keeping her short of pocket-money, the husband necessarily makes his wife feel that the earth is her habitation and the clouds of heaven many miles away.