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