They stood humorously staring down at his things on the doorstep.
“Yes,” he agreed with a sigh, “it is nice. Lord, what wouldn’t I give if
there was nothing in the world left to do but just settle down for good!”
Her brows were drawn quite earnestly. “How _often_ lately I’ve thought
that _too_, though of course it’s hardly more than a ‘snatch’ of
impractical _dreaming_—isn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” he admitted, almost reluctantly. “It’s only once in a
while when you bump up against a place like this, with roses climbing all
over everything, and then—those bags at the door.... Lord, doesn’t one
get tired, sometimes, of everlastingly hustling?”
“And yet,” she reminded him with a smile, “it’s the very thing we have to
_do_, isn’t it—_both_ of us?”
“Yes, the very thing.”
“It—it’s our _obstacle_!” Her eyes sparkled.
Then he asked, his voice grown warm and ardent: “Are we going to let it
be an obstacle always?”
“No, not _always_,” she replied, her own voice cordial and eager and
reassuring.
“How are we ever going to make the merry-go-round stop?”
“Oh, _some_ way will open up, I _know_!”
They strolled out on to the lawn and sat down in a bona-fide,
old-fashioned, creaky garden swing.
“I don’t suppose,” he suggested wistfully, giving her a most enticing
smile, “you ever take little flying trips into Africa?”
“Are you _determined_ to go so far then?” she demanded, with a playful,
deprecating contraction of her brow.
“Ah, but I have to!” he told her, looking almost alarmed, as though
she were spreading for him a delicious snare which he might find it
impossible to resist. “We’re all advertised! We open in Cape Town, and
after that—Johannesburg.”
“Of course it would _never_ do to leave out _Africa_,” she assured him
comfortingly. “And after all, you’ve only _begun_, haven’t you, if it’s
to be a real ‘world tour’?”
He held up a pleading hand and smiled. “It makes me a little tired to
look ahead so far!”
“But don’t you _remember_ how you couldn’t _wait_ to start out in the
_beginning_?”
The impresario bit off the end of a cigar and mused, his words punctuated
with spaces of lighting and taking the first rapid puffs: “That was a
long while ago, wasn’t it? I thought nothing of such details as world
tours then! Yet I truly believe the first feeling of the vastness of our
terrestrial ball came upon me—no, you’d laugh!”
“But you know I _never_ laugh!” she reproached him, laughing, her heart
beating a little faster as she sensed the trend of the talk.
“Well, then—the very day of the Hoadley auction!”
“_Really?_ Yet you never knew how _impressed_ I was with it all, and what
a great thing it seemed to _do_, though it _did_ go through my head, too,
that ‘Singapore’ is—well, a pretty long way _off_!”
“The place that really began giving me shivers of homesickness,” he
confessed, “was Cape _Horn_!”
There was a silence, and he was musing over her phrase: “A way will open
up.” A little later they drove back through the quiet radiance of a
tropical afternoon.
“I’m _afraid_,” she laughed deliciously, “your ‘songbirds’ will make up
their minds I’ve carried you right off the _island_!”
“You have,” he replied dreamily. “Off the island, and all the way back
to that snug apartment with the new colour scheme, and we’re sitting
together over our Sunday night bowls of bread and milk, with the
gate-legged table between us....”
She lowered her eyes and slipped him one of her hands. So one sees that
the songbirds, when it came to that, would really be not unjustified in
their decision!