What happened after that Ikey could never clearly remember. Bits of the
ensuing conversation came back to her, memories of the sickening rage,
the stupefying bewilderment that possessed her, and the exhaustion that
followed. But order there was none. And she was sure she never got the
whole of it.
At one stage in the proceedings she had observed in a haughty voice that
she did not care to have his sympathy--or pity--take that form.
"Oh, it's not that," he assured her pleasantly; "but I'm tired of
knocking around the world alone. I need an anchor. I think you"--he
looked at her impersonally, but politely--"would make a good anchor."
"You mean you want me to reform you!"
He smiled a careful smile.
"No-o. I don't feel the need of reforming. There's nothing the matter
with me----"
"How lovely to have such a high opinion of oneself."
"Yes. Isn't it? But as I was saying----"
At another stage she tried to take refuge behind the usual platitude:
she did not love him.
He considered this--at ease before her, his hands in his pockets.
"Well, when it comes to that, I don't love you, either"--Ikey
gasped--"but I don't consider that that makes any difference."
Another break.
Then, "What'll you do, if you don't?" he had asked her in a businesslike
manner. "You're just on the verge of a breakdown"--She knew it; and his
tone of conviction did not add to her sense of security--"Another scene
like to-day's would upset you completely. You say you have no friends or
relatives here; and there's no one you want to go to away from here. And
besides, I can look after you a great deal better than you can look
after yourself."
There must have been much arguing after that. There must have; for she
had not the slightest intention of being disposed of in this medieval
fashion. But in the midst of some determined though shaky sentence of
hers, he had said quite kindly and finally that they need not discuss
the matter any further--besides, she had to have a good stiff lunch
right off--and had piloted her carefully, but with no over-powering air
of devotion, out of the empty lots, around the corner, and into an
automobile.
"It was all the fault of that wretched beefsteak," mourned Ikey an hour
or two later. "If I'd only had it before, it never would have
happened--never. I shall always have a grudge against it. What am I to
do now?"
The automobile had conveyed them smoothly, first, to a clergyman's, of
all people; next, to a restaurant; then, to the boarding-house, where
her few belongings had found their way into a telescope basket; and now
it was conveying them through the bedraggled outskirts of the city into
the country beyond.
A hatchet-faced chauffeur was manipulating things in front; while the
unspeakable man in gray sat unemotionally beside her in the tonneau and
looked the other way.
"What am I to do now?" The bewildered girl found no answer to the one
question of her mind. "Why don't you faint?" she asked herself severely.
"Why don't you faint? If you had an idea of helping me out of this
pickle, you'd do it at once, and never come to at all, and then have
brain fever. It's the only decent solution. Instead of that, here you
are, feeling--actually comfortable."
She stared ahead of her with miserable eyes.
"It was all that miserable beefsteak. The thing must have been six
inches thick. Beast; why couldn't he have taken me to the restaurant
first? Then I'd never have gone to the clergyman's. And that license.
Where did he get it? We never stopped for one--he just pulled it out of
his pocket, as though it had been a handkerchief. Ikey, you're married,
_married_--do you quite understand?--to a man who wears ready-made
clothes and doesn't love you and lives in an attic boarding-house
bed-room. And what is he doing with this automobile? And what is his
business? Oh, he's probably a chauffeur; and he's borrowed his
employer's bubble; and this other chauffeur in front's his best friend
and ashamed of him on account of the beefsteak business. He'd better be.
But what shall I say to him? What shall I _say_?--Oh--h"--heaven-sent
inspiration--"I'll say nothing at all. I will be--so different."
On and on and on went the machine. The girl closed her eyes upon the
dusty, dun-colored landscape.
"Serves me right for turning over my bank account to Cousin Mary
and--and----"
She had fallen asleep, propped up in her corner of the machine--worn out
by this climax to the weeks that had gone before.
The man at her side turned and looked at her. His face no longer wore
its placidly and conventionally polite expression.