The Faraway Bride by Stella Benson — Read

The night of the goose and champagne -- the night of Seryozha's arrival at the Ostapenkos' house -- seemed the longest night in the whole realm of time -- a sort of Methuselah of a night. The days of a man's life, thought Seryozha, are of different ranks -- counts, princes, fat bourgeois days, rough peasant days -- but this was a grand, duke of a day, a giant of rank, quite outside the standard of ordinary days. Each royal minute was like an hour, each hour like a crowned year. All the other days of his life should bow before this -- the day that promoted him to be a king, to be married, to drink champagne.

Wilfred's great day, which, for some little time, may be said to have been in eclipse, rose again when the goose was served. Wilfred, on being tactfully roused by Seryozha and led away to put his head under the pump, assumed a guiltily bright manner, to prove to the world, and to the absent Reverend Oswald Fawcett (who was Wilfred's conscience) that he had not drunk any wine to speak of. He did not notice that his legal document had disappeared from in front of him; he hardly remembered having written it, though it remained a settled plan in his mind; his tongue felt a little knotted and uncertain, but that did not matter, since scarcely anyone would have understood anything he said in any case. He enjoyed the goose.