Fate was adverse for the moment to Arthur Berkeley’s well meant designs for shuffling off the trammels of his ecclesiastical habit. He was destined to appear in public at least once more, not only in the black coat and white tie of his everyday professional costume, but even in the flowing snowy surplice of a solemn and decorous spiritual function. The very next morning’s post brought him a little note from Ernest Le Breton specially begging him, in his own name and Edie’s, to come down to Calcombe Pomeroy, and officiate as parson at their approaching wedding. The note had cost Ernest a conscientious struggle, for he would have personally preferred to be married at a Registry Office, as being more in accordance with the duties of a good citizen, and savouring less of effete ecclesiastical superstition; but he felt he couldn’t even propose such a step to Edie; she wouldn’t have considered herself married at all, unless she were married quite regularly by a duly qualified clerk in holy orders of the Church of England as by law established. Already, indeed, Ernest was beginning to recognise with a sigh that if he was going to live in the world at all, he must do so by making at least a partial sacrifice of political consistency. You may step out of your own century, if you choose, yourself, but you can’t get all the men and women with whom you come in contact to step out of it also in unison just to please you.

So Ernest had sat down reluctantly to his desk, and consented to ask Arthur Berkeley to assist at the important ceremony in his professional clerical capacity. If he was going to have a medicine man or a priest at all to marry him to the girl of his choice—a barbaric survival, at the best, he thought it—he would, at any rate, prefer having his friend Arthur—a good man and true—to having the fat, easy-going, purse-proud rector of the parish; the younger son of a wealthy family who had gone into the Church for the sake of the living, and who rolled sumptuously down the long hilly High Street every day in his comfortable carriage, leaning back with his fat hands folded complacently over his ample knees, and gazing abstractedly, with his little pigs’-eyes half buried in his cheek, at the beautiful prospect afforded him by the broad livery-covered backs of his coachman and his footman. Ernest could never have consented to lot that lazy, overfed, useless encumbrance on a long-suffering commonwealth, that idle gorger of dainty meats and choice wines from the tithes of the tolling, suffering people, bear any part in what was after all the most solemn and serious contract of his whole lifetime. And, to say the truth, Edie quite agreed with him on that point, too. Though her moral indignation against poor, useless, empty-headed old Mr. Walters didn’t burn quite so fierce or so clear as Ernest’s—she regarded the fat old parson, indeed, rather from the social point of view, as a ludicrously self-satisfied specimen of the lower stages of humanity, than from the political point of view, as a greedy swallower of large revenues for small work inefficiently performed—she would still have felt that his presence at her wedding jarred and grated on all the finer sensibilities of her nature, as out of accord with the solemn and tender associations of that supreme moment. To have been married by prosy old Mr. Walters, to have taken the final benediction on the greatest act of her life from those big white fat fingers, would have spoilt the reminiscence of the wedding day for her as long as she lived. But when Ernest suggested Arthur Berkeley’s name to her, she acquiesced with all her heart in the happy selection. She liked Berkeley better than anybody else she had ever met, except Ernest; and she knew that his presence would rather add one more bright association to the day than detract from it in the coming years. Her poor little wedding would want all the additions that friends could make to its cheerfulness, to get over the lasting gloom and blank of dear Harry’s absence.

‘You will come and help us, I know, Berkeley,’ Ernest wrote to Arthur in his serious fashion. ‘We feel there is nobody else we should so like to have present at our wedding as yourself. Come soon, too, for there are lots of things I want to talk over with you. It’s a very solemn responsibility, getting married: you have to take upon yourself the duty of raising up future citizens for the state; and with our present knowledge of how nature works through the laws of heredity, you have to think whether you two who contemplate marriage are well fitted to act as parents to the generations that are to be. When I remember that all my own faults and failings may be handed on relentlessly to those that come after us—built up in the very fibre of their being—I am half appalled at my own temerity. Then, again, there is the inexorable question of money; is it prudent or is it wrong of us to marry on such an uncertainty? I’m afraid that Schurz and Malthas would tell us—very wrong. I have turned over these things by myself till I’m tired of arguing them out in my own head, and I want you to come down beforehand, so as to cheer me up a bit with your lighter and brighter philosophy. On the very eve of my marriage, I’m somehow getting dreadfully pessimistic.’

Arthur read the letter through impatiently and crumpled it up in his hands with a gesture of despondency. ‘Poor little Miss Butterfly,’ he said to himself, pityingly, ‘was there ever such an abstraction of an ethical unit as this good, solemn, self-torturing Ernest! How will she ever live with him? How will he ever live with her? Poor little soul! Harry is gone like the sunshine out of her life; and now this well-meaning, gloomy, conscientious cloud comes caressingly to overspread her with the shadowing pall of its endless serious doubts and hesitations. Fancy a man who has won little Miss Butterfly’s heart—dear little Miss Butterfly’s gay, laughing, tender little heart—writing such a letter as that to the friend who’s going to marry them! Upon my word, I’ve half a mind to go into the concientious scruples business on my own account! Have I any right to be a party to fettering poor airy fairy little Miss Butterfly, with a heavy iron............