Excerpt from A Rational Marriage The modern commonplace Bayswater wed ding was over. The gaping, dirty crowd which had hung about the front door of Mrs. Pon sonby's house for an hour, had had the grati fication of seeing the bridegroom, looking very conscious and uncomfortable in a suit of brand new clothes, hand the bride, gowned as though she were going to a fe'te champetre, into the hired carriage with its pair of gray horses and its bouquetted coachman a shower of rice and old shoes had heralded their departure, and now the wedding guests had nothing left to do but to discuss the event, wander about the empty rooms, and review for the twentieth time the cosies, sofa cushions, biscuit-boxes, card-cases and similar useless articles with which the drawing-room table was piled. Mrs. Ponsonby, who had been slaving to get things ready for the ceremony for the last three days. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.