"I know--trying on! And you're horribly tired, and wishing with all your
might I wasn't here."
"I'm not so sure I'm not!" she rejoined, trying to hide her vexation in
a smile.
"What a tragic little voice! You really are done up. I couldn't help
dropping in for a minute; but of course if you say so I'll be off." She
was removing her long gloves and he took her hands and drew her close.
"Only take off your veil, and let me see you."
A quiver of resistance ran through her: he felt it and dropped her
hands.
"Please don't tease. I never could bear it," she stammered, drawing
away.
"Till to-morrow, then; that is, if the dress-makers permit."
She forced a laugh. "If I showed myself now you might not come back
to-morrow. I look perfectly hideous--it was so hot and they kept me so
long."
"All to make yourself more beautiful for a man who's blind with your
beauty already?"
The words made her smile, and moving nearer she bent her head and stood
still while he undid her veil. As he put it back their lips met, and his
look of passionate tenderness was incense to her.
But the next moment his expression passed from worship to concern.
"Dear! Why, what's the matter? You've been crying!"
She put both hands to her hat in the instinctive effort to hide her
face. His persistence was as irritating as her mother's.
"I told you it was frightfully hot--and all my things were horrid; and
it made me so cross and nervous!" She turned to the looking-glass with a
feint of smoothing her hair.
Marvell laid his hand on her arm, "I can't bear to see you so done up.
Why can't we be married to-morrow, and escape all these ridiculous
preparations? I shall hate your fine clothes if they're going to make
you so miserable."
She dropped her hands, and swept about on him, her face lit up by a new
idea. He was extraordinarily handsome and appealing, and her heart began
to beat faster.
"I hate it all too! I wish we COULD be married right away!"
Marvell caught her to him joyously. "Dearest--dearest! Don't, if you
don't mean it! The thought's too glorious!"
Undine lingered in his arms, not with any intent of tenderness, but as
if too deeply lost in a new train of thought to be conscious of his
hold.
"I suppose most of the things COULD be got ready sooner--if I said they
MUST," she brooded, with a fixed gaze that travelled past him. "And the
rest--why shouldn't the rest be sent over to Europe after us? I want to
go straight off with you, away from everything--ever so far away,
where there'll be nobody but you and me alone!" She had a flash of
illumination which made her turn her lips to his.
"Oh, my darling--my darling!" Marvell whispered.
X
Mr. and Mrs. Spragg were both given to such long periods of ruminating
apathy that the student of inheritance might have wondered whence Undine
derived her overflowing activity. The answer would have been obtained
by observing her father's business life. From the moment he set foot
in Wall Street Mr. Spragg became another man. Physically the change
revealed itself only by the subtlest signs. As he steered his way to his
office through the jostling crowd of William Street his relaxed muscles
did not grow more taut or his lounging gait less desultory. His
shoulders were hollowed by the usual droop, and his rusty black
waistcoat showed the same creased concavity at the waist, the same
flabby prominence below. It was only in his face that the difference was
perceptible, though even here it rather lurked behind the features than
openly modified them: showing itself now and then in the cautious glint
of half-closed eyes, the forward thrust of black brows, or a tightening
of the lax lines of the mouth--as the gleam of a night-watchman's light
might flash across the darkness of a shuttered house-front. The shutters
were more tightly barred than usual, when, on a morning some two
weeks later than the date of the incidents last recorded, Mr. Spragg
approached the steel and concrete tower in which his office occupied a
lofty pigeon-hole. Events had moved rapidly and somewhat surprisingly in
the interval, and Mr. Spragg had already accustomed himself to the fact
that his daughter was to be married within the week, instead of awaiting
the traditional post-Lenten date. Conventionally the change meant little
to him; but on the practical side it presented unforeseen difficulties.
Mr. Spragg had learned within the last weeks that a New York marriage
involved material obligations unknown to Apex. Marvell, indeed, had
been loftily careless of such questions; but his grandfather, on the
announcement of the engagement, had called on Mr. Spragg and put before
him, with polished precision, the young man's financial situation.
Mr. Spragg, at the moment, had been inclined to deal with his visitor in
a spirit of indulgent irony. As he leaned back in his revolving chair,
with feet adroitly balanced against a tilted scrap basket, his air of
relaxed power made Mr. Dagonet's venerable elegance seem as harmless as
that of an ivory jack-straw--and his first replies to his visitor were
made with the mildness of a kindly giant.
"Ralph don't make a living out of the law, you say? No, it didn't strike
me he'd be likely to, from the talks I've had with him. Fact is, the
law's a business that wants--" Mr. Spragg broke off, checked by a
protest from Mr. Dagonet. "Oh, a PROFESSION, you call it? It ain't a
business?" His smile grew more indulgent as this novel distinction
dawned on him. "Why, I guess that's the whole trouble with Ralph. Nobody
expects to make money in a PROFESSION; and if you've taught him to
regard the law that way, he'd better go right into cooking-stoves and
done with it."
Mr. Dagonet, within a narrower range, had his own play of humour; and it
met Mr. Spragg's with a leap. "It's because I knew he would manage to
make cooking-stoves as unremunerative as a profession that I saved him
from so glaring a failure by putting him into the law."
The retort drew a grunt of amusement from Mr. Spragg; and the eyes of
the two men met in unexpected understanding.
"That so? What can he do, then?" the future father-in-law enquired.
"He can write poetry--at least he tells me he can." Mr. Dagonet
hesitated, as if aware of the inadequacy of the alternative, and then
added: "And he can count on three thousand a year from me."
Mr. Spragg tilted himself farther back without disturbing his
subtly-calculated relation to the scrap basket.
"Does it cost anything like that to print his poetry?"
Mr. Dagonet smiled again: he was clearly enjoying his visit. "Dear,
no--he doesn't go in for 'luxe' editions. And now and then he gets ten
dollars from a magazine."