After he presides over afternoon services, Mr. Hooper officiates at a funeral first and then a wedding. At the funeral, his veil was "an appropriate emblem." It didn't seem so out of place at a funeral where its somber color echoed the sadness of the occasion. The gloom and the pall that it casts over both the minister's whole person as well as anyone who looks at him seemed not incongruous in the context of a sad funeral for a young maiden.
However, at the wedding, it is a dramatically different story. Now, the veil is described as "horrible," and it seems to "portend nothing but evil to the wedding" where it had only "added deeper gloom to the funeral." The bride quivers and shakes during the ceremony, "and her deathlike paleness caused a whisper that the maiden who had been buried a few hours before was come from her grave to be married." People do not want to consider sins and souls and death at a wedding; they want to focus on the happiness possible in the here and now. Moreover, when Mr. Hooper catches a glimpse of himself in a mirror, even he is so horrified by his aspect that he drops his wine and rushes out into the night.
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