Oh, dignity! Oh, austere grief! What crimes are committed in thy name! In these days one might well paraphrase the famous lines from _The School for Scandal_ and render them: "When a young girl marries a middle-aged man, what is she to expect?" The situation was graver than even Willoughby Hewston could have predicted. In the first surprise Alice had exclaimed, "Why, that's Cress!" And then to relieve Preston of embarrassment before the Warrens, an embarrassment which was manifesting itself in the deep flush which overspread his face, "He probably got through sooner than he expected," she said in a matter-of-fact tone and dropped the subject.
But she thanked fortune that both Mr. and Mrs. Warren were talkative people given volubly to voice their enthusiasm over the beauty about them, and thus her rather stunned preoccupation passed unnoticed.
She had upon her journey, and even before she started, pictured herself as a sort of missionary, with the not altogether unpleasant task before her of cheering up poor Cresswell. She knew the strength of his few affections, his devotion to Perdita and therefore she had some idea of how deeply this breach between them had affected him. But like most women, even the experienced ones, she had never realized that the masculine and feminine attitude toward grief is as wide apart as the poles. They may both wear rue, but with a difference. Woman seeks a cloister that she may brood over her sorrow, commune with it, hug it to her heart in solitude, but man does his best to shake that black, haunting shape, tries to lose it in a crowd, and willingly sips any kind of a nepenthes which seems to offer him forgetfulness.
Alice Wilstead had not expected that Hepworth would make any unmanly exhibition of his woes, weep on her shoulder or be excitingly dramatic; she knew him too well. But she had expected to see him a little older, perhaps; a little grayer, sadder, more quiet, with a hint of melancholy in his eyes. He might--occasionally she pictured the scene--open his heart to her now and then in a grave and reticent way and disclose a strong man's grief; but instead she had seen him sitting up in a very smartly appointed carriage beside a correspondingly smart young woman in a white serge gown, who was in the very act of popping an enormous _marron glacé_ between his willing teeth.