A Change of Air by Antonio Hope

It is never well to vie with experts in their own subjects; humiliation surely attends the audacious attempt, and a humiliation which receives and deserves no softening sympathy. Moreover, even if the technical difficulties could be overcome, the description of a wedding must be either florid or cynical, assuming impossible happiness, or insinuating improbable catastrophe. Wherefore this narrative, which abhors either of these extremes, takes leave to resume its course at the moment when Sir Harry and Lady Fulmer have been driven away for their honeymoon, and the guests at Mount Pleasant are engaged in looking at one another's presents, one another's clothes, and their own watches, while a group of men have sought retirement and cigars in the garden. The Lord Lieutenant was paying compliments of alarming elaboration and stateliness to Nellie Fane; and Janet Delane, having discharged her duty in that line with generous graciousness, was looking with despair at Captain Ripley's puzzled face and betugged mustache, and wondering why men could not or would not understand plain English, and why -- why above all -- they had no more sense of dignity or of timeliness than to renew useless entreaties in a roomful of people, and -- to descend to the particular case -- with Dale Bannister only a few yards away, paying obvious inattention to a rhapsodic bridesmaid.

"Wasn't it a pretty wedding?" asked the bridesmaid. "You know I'm a stranger to Denborough, and I never knew you had so many beautiful girls. It might have been St. Peter's."