"Sit down, sad Soul!" Missy's mood could no longer even attempt to
mate with prose. She turned through the pages of the Anthology until
she came to another favourite:

So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war, There never was knight
like young Lochinvar.

This she read through, with a fine, swinging rhythm. "I think that
last stanza's perfectly exquisite--don't you?" Missy enquired of her
mute audience. And she repeated it, as unctuously as though she were
the poet herself. Then, quite naturally, this romance recalled to
her the romance next door, so deliciously absorbing her waking and
dreaming hours--the romance of her own Miss Princess. Miss Princess-
-Missy's more formal adaptation of Young Doc's soubriquet for Helen
Greenleaf in the days of his romance--was the most beautiful heroine
imaginable. And the Wedding was next week, and Missy was to walk
first of all the six flower-girls, and the Pink Dress was all but
done, and the Pink Stockings--silk!--were upstairs in the third
drawer of the high-boy! Oh, it was a golden world, radiant with joy.
Of course--it's only earth, after all, and not heaven--she'd rather
the bridegroom was going to be young Doc. But Miss Princess had
arranged it this other way--her bridegroom had come out of the East.
And the Wedding was almost here! . . . There never was morning so
fair, nor grass so vivid and shiny, nor air so soft. Above her head
the cherry-buds were swelling, almost ready to burst. From the open
windows of the house, down the street, sounds from a patient piano,
flattered by distance, betokened that Kitty Allen was struggling
with "Perpetual Motion"; Missy, who had finished her struggles with
that abomination-to-beginners a month previously felt her sense of
beatitude deepen.