The natural assumption to Mary, if your theory about her were true, is that she will get married and get pregnant and have a baby son, who will have a great future. She was betrothed, remember?
The angel did not mean "right away". He said "thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and shalt bring forth a son",-- indicating normal pregnancy,-- and ideed it took her the usual gestational 9 months, as the scripture tells us. Nothing in his speech prior to Mary's question in v.34 indicates anything extraordinary regarding the physiology of Jesus' birth. Where has your school of plain reading disappeared?
The natural assumption to Mary, if your theory about her were true, is that she will get married and get pregnant and have a baby son, who will have a great future. She was betrothed, remember?
OK, I better see where you are coming from now, and it seems more reasonable to me. But, I still believe it can be fairly taken either way on this point. I know she was still betrothed at the time, and my understanding is that process could take up to a year or more to complete. So, we cannot assume that she was getting married the next day. In any event, my reasoning was that the reason she asked the question was that she was still betrothed, AND that she correctly interpreted that the angel meant she would become pregnant before any union with Joseph. (That's what I meant by "right away", I agree she had a normal gestational period.) In that scenario, her question was logical.
I can understand an angel appearing to an old woman and telling her she's going to conceive. That's real news. But in a case like this, it just seems to me that if an angel really appeared to me at this moment, one thing I would wonder is "why appear now?". Under the stress of the situation, I would assume that whatever the angel told me was going to happen, would happen sometime soon, not in some ambiguous future. Of course I can't prove this is what Mary thought, I just tried to put myself in her sandals and figure what she may have thought. :)