They were spending the few days before sailing in
a very grand hotel, overlooking Central Park. Sylvia had almost every
day the thought that she herself was now in the center of exactly the
same picture in which, as a child, she had enviously watched Aunt
Victoria. She adored every detail of it. It was an opening-out, even
from the Lydford life. She felt herself expanding like a dried sponge
placed in water, to fill every crack and crevice of the luxurious
habits of life. The traveling along that road is always swift; and
Sylvia's feet were never slow. During the first days in Vermont,
it had seemed a magnificence to her that she need never think of
dish-washing or bed-making. By this time it seemed quite natural to
her that Helene drew and tempered the water for her bath, and put on
her stockings. Occasionally she noticed with a little surprise that
she seemed to have no more free time than in the laborious life of La
Chance; but for the most part she threw out, in all haste, innumerable
greedy root-tendrils into the surcharged richness of her new soil and
sent up a rank growth of easeful acquiescence in redundance.
The wedding was quite as grand as the Sommervilles had tried to make
it. The street was crowded with staring, curious, uninvited people on
either side of the church, and when the carriage containing the bride
drove up, the surge forward to see her was as fierce as though she had
been a defaulting bank-president being taken to prison.
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