"Well, Roger, I want to hear what you thought about the wedding," she said. She had not gone to church that morning with Nancy and it was, he knew, because she wanted an interchange of frank impressions. She had been prevented from attending Miss Toner's London nuptials by a touch of influenza and, as she now went on to say, she had got little from Nancy, who had no eye for pageants and performances. "Eleanor was so absorbed," she went on, "in the fact that the Bishop had indigestion and had, at her suggestion, taken magnesia with his breakfast, that I could not get much else out of her. She seemed to have seen the Bishop's symptoms rather than Adrienne and Barney. Now from you I expect all the relevant details."
"Well, if you call it a detail, Nancy was lovely," said Oldmeadow. "She looked like a silver-birch in her white and green."
"And pearls," said Mrs. Averil. "You noticed, of course, the necklaces Adrienne gave them; quite the gift of a princess, yet so innocent and unobtrusive looking, too. She has great taste in such matters. Did she look well? Eleanor did say that she, like the Bishop, was very pale."
"She was pale; but not a bit nervous. She rather looked as if she had been married every day of her life. Nothing ever puts her out, you know. She was very grave and benign; but she wasn't an imposing bride and the wreath of orange-blossoms aged her. Nancy and Meg and Barbara and the Lumley girl aged her, too. She must be older than Barney."
"Yes; she is. A year older. But she's the sort of woman who will wear," said Mrs. Averil, pausing before a bed of rose-trees to snip off a fading flower. "She'll not look very differently at fifty, you know; and her hair is the sort that may never turn grey. I can see her at seventy with those big golden braids and all her teeth. There's something very indestructible about her. Like a doll made of white leather compared to one made of porcelain. She'll last and last," said Mrs. Averil. "She'll outlast us all. Barney was radiant, of course."
"Yes. But he _was_ nervous; like a little boy frightened by the splendour of his Christmas-tree. He looked as though he were arm in arm with the Christmas-tree itself as he came down the nave. A rather dumpy little Christmas-tree, but exquisitely lighted and garnished."