" This he said with a
spirit for which Mrs. Crabtree had not given him credit, and Algy Soames
heard him and admired his friend beneath his blue necktie. And one of
the girls heard it, and cried tears of joy as she told her sister
afterward in the bedroom. "Oh, what a darling he is!" Molly had said,
amid her own sobbing. Joe stood an inch higher among them all because of
that word.
Then came the breakfast,--that dullest, saddest hour of all. To feed
heavily about twelve in the morning is always a nuisance,--a nuisance so
abominable that it should be avoided under any other circumstances than
a wedding in your own family. But that wedding-breakfast, when it does
come, is the worst of all feeding. The smart dresses and bare shoulders
seen there by daylight, the handing people in and out among the seats,
the very nature of the food, made up of chicken and sweets and flummery,
the profusion of champagne, not sometimes of the very best on such an
occasion; and then the speeches! They fall generally to the lot of some
middle-aged gentlemen, who seem always to have been selected for their
incapacity. But there is a worse trouble yet remaining--in the unnatural
repletion which the sight even of so much food produces, and the fact
that your dinner for that day is destroyed utterly and forever.
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