Jean shrank from the congratulations of the boarding-house and the
office, and they decided at the outset to keep their engagement to
themselves.
"Not barring your mother, of course," Paul amended. "To play strictly
according to Hoyle, I expect I ought to drop her a line. What do you
think?"
"It won't be necessary," Jean said.
The dentist sighed thankfully.
"Glad to hear it. The chances are she'd say no, straight off the bat,
if I did. Letter-writing isn't my long suit. What will you say about a
proposition like me, anyhow?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing? Least said the better, eh?"
"I mean I'm not going to write."
"Not at all?"
"Not till we are married. I will write home then."
Paul whistled meditatively.
"Mind telling why?" he queried. "Can't say that this play seems
according to Hoyle, either."
Jean's real reason was rooted in a fear that Mrs. Fanshaw's erratic
conscience might be capable of a motherly epistle to Paul, setting
forth the refuge history. So she answered that she and her family were
not in sympathy, and was overjoyed to find that Paul thought her excuse
valid.
"I know just how you feel," he said. "My governor and I could never
hit it off. But about writing your mother: we'll need her consent, you
know. You're still under twenty-one."
"I come of age September tenth."
"But we want to be married the third week in August."
"We can't," said Jean; and that was the end of it.
This postponement notwithstanding, it seemed to her that she fairly
tobogganed toward her marriage. Even before her return to work, Paul
notified Grimes of his intention to shift for himself after October
and leased the office of which he had told her. With the same energy,
of which he gratefully assured her she was the dynamo, he promptly had
her hunting Harlem for the little flat, just around the corner, of his
imaginings. For so modest a thing, this proved singularly elusive, and
it took a month of Sundays, besides unreckoned week-day explorations,
before they lit finally upon what they wanted, in a building so new
that the plumbers and paper-hangers still overran its upper floors.
The "Lorna Doone" was an apartment house. The prospectus said so; the
elevator and the hall service proved it. Mere flats have stairs and
ghostly front doors which unseen hands unlock. Mere flats have also at
times an old-fashioned roominess which apartments usually lack; but
as Paul, out of a now ripe experience with agents and janitors, justly
remarked, they have no tone. This essential attribute--the agents and
janitors agreed that it was essential--seemed to him to exhale from
the Lorna Doone with a certainty not evident in many higher-priced
buildings whose entrances boasted far less onyx paneling and mosaic.
Besides tone or, more correctly perhaps, as a constituent of tone, this
edifice had location, which Jean was surprised to learn was a thing to
be considered even in this happily unfashionable section.
There was Harlem and Harlem, it appeared; and taught partly by Paul,
partly by the real-estate brokers, she became adept in the subtle
distinctions between streets which seemingly differed only in their
numerals. For example, there was a quarter, _the_ quarter to be
accurate, once called Harlem Heights, which now in the full-blown pride
of its cathedral, its university, and its hero's mausoleum, haughtily
declared itself not Harlem at all. They had scaled this favored region
in their quest, admired its parks, watched the Hudson from its airy
windows, and hoped vainly to find some nook their purse might command;
but they had to turn their steps from it at last. This glimpse of the
unattainable was a strong, if not controlling, factor in their final
choice.
"We can't be hermits and live in a hole," Paul argued. "I know a big
bunch of people here already, and we'll soon know more. We've got to
hold up our end. Nice name we'd get in our club if we didn't entertain
once in a while like the rest."
"Our club!" she echoed. "We're to join a club?"
"Sure. Bowling club, I mean. Everybody bowls in Harlem. We must think
about the office, too. It's the women who make or break a dentist's
practice, and sooner or later they find out how he lives and the kind
of company he keeps."
After a reflective silence he frightened her by asking abruptly whether
she remembered a loud girl who had come to the dental parlors for an
appointment the day of her first illness.
"The chatty party who thought I wasn't sociable," he particularized.
"Her name's Wilkes."
Jean remembered.
"Well, she came back," pursued the dentist, slowly. "I filled a tooth
for her the next morning. She had a good deal to say."
She brought herself to look at him. If the past must be faced now, she
would meet it like the honest girl she was. But Paul's manner was not
accusing, and when he spoke again, it was of neither Stella nor herself.
"How much does Amy get a week?" he asked.
She told him, and he nodded as over a point proved.
"Would it surprise you to hear that she draws five dollars less? That
does surprise you, doesn't it?"
"How do you know?"
"My drug-department patient told me long ago. I didn't think much
about it at the time, for some girls dress well on mighty little; but
when--well, the long and short of it is, that Wilkes woman knows Amy!"
Jean pulled herself together somehow. Amy's defense was for the moment
her own.
"Need that condemn Amy?" she said.
"Of course not," returned Paul judiciously. "It might happen to you, or
anybody. Perhaps she says she knows me. It's the way she came to know
her that counts. The Wilkes girl got very confidential when I left her
mouth free. She had tanked up with firewater for the occasion, and it
oiled her tongue. I didn't pay much attention until Amy Jeffries's name
slipped out, but I listened after that. I thought it was due you."
"And she said--?"
"She said a lot I won't rehash, but it all boils down to the fact that
they both graduated from the same reformatory."
She must tell him now! White-faced, miserable, she nerved herself to
speak.
"Paul!" she appealed.
He was instantly all concern for her distress.
"Don't take it so hard," he begged. "She isn't worth it."
"You don't understand. I--I knew."
"You knew what?"
"About the--reformatory. I once told you I met Amy in the country."
"I remember."
"Well," the confession came haltingly, "it was the refuge I meant. I
met her at the refuge."
She waited with eyes averted for the question which should bare all.
Instead, she suddenly felt Paul's caress and faced him to meet a smile.
"You _are_ a trump!" he ejaculated. "To know all the while and never
give her away!"
He had not understood! Trembling like a reprieved criminal, she heard
him go on to complete his self-deception.
"I was going to ask you to let Amy slide after we were married," he
said, "but if you believe in her this much, I reckon she's worth
helping. I don't suppose all refuge girls are of the Wilkes stripe."
The crisis past, she half regretted that she could not have screwed
her courage to the point of a full confession, but this feeling was
transitory. Paul rested content with his own explanations and talked
of little else than their flat, and she, too, presently found their
home-building absorbing.
A more minute inspection of the Lorna Doone, after the signing of the
lease, revealed that the outer splendor had its inner penalties.
"Looks like a case of rob Paul to pay Peter, this trip," said the
dentist. "Peter is the owner's first name, you know. The woodwork is
cheap, the bathtubs are seconds, and the closets, as you say, aren't
worth mentioning. I'll gamble the building laws have been dodged from
subcellar to cornice. I hear he has run up a dozen like it, and every
blessed one on spec. That's why we're getting six weeks' rent free.
It's anything to fill the house and hook some sucker who hankers for an
investment and never suspects the leases don't amount to shucks."
"Don't they?"
"Ours doesn't. Why, the man as much as told me to clear out when the
building changes hands, if I like."
Jean looked round the bright little toy of a kitchen where they stood.
"I shan't want to leave," she said. "It already seems like home."
It seemed more and more a home as their preparations went forward. They
were not supposed to enter into formal possession till late in August,
but the complaisant owner gave Paul a key some weeks before and made
no objection to their moving in anything they pleased. So it fell out
that their modest six-rooms-and-bath in the Lorna Doone became in a
way a sanctuary to which they went evenings when they could, and made
beautiful according to their light.
It was a precious experience. Such wise planning it involved! Such
ardent scanning of advertisements, such sweet toil of shopping, such
rich rewards in midsummer bargains! They did not appreciate the
magnitude of their needs till an out-of-the-way store, which fashion
never patronized, put them concretely before their eyes in a window
display. In successive show-windows, each as large as any of their
rooms at the Lorna Doone, this enterprising firm had deployed a whole
furnished flat. Furthermore, they had peopled it. In the parlor, which
one saw first, a waxen lady in a yellow tea-gown sat embroidering by
the gas-log, while over against her lounged a waxen gentleman in velvet
smoking-jacket and slippers--a most inviting domestic picture, even
though its atmosphere was somewhat cluttered with price-marks.
"That's you and me," said Paul, tenderly ungrammatical.
Jean was less romantically preoccupied.
"I'd quite forgotten curtains," she mused. "They'll take a pretty
penny."
Thereupon the dentist discovered things which he had overlooked.
"We must have a bookcase," he said. "That combination case and desk
certainly looks swell. What say to one like it?"
"Have you any books?"
"I should smile. I've got together the best little dental library you
can buy."
"Then you'll keep it at your office," decided Jean, promptly. "When we
have a library about something besides teeth, we'll think about a case."
The shopkeeper's imaginative realism extended also to the other rooms.
Real fruit adorned the dining-room buffet; the neat kitchen was
tenanted by a maid in uniform, whom they dubbed "Marie" and agreed
that they could do without; while in one of the bedrooms they came upon
a crib whose occupant they studiously refrained to classify.
"But for kitchenware," said Paul, abruptly, "the five-and-ten-cent
stores have this place beaten to a pulp."
With this, then, as a working model, to which Paul was ever returning
for inspiration, they made their purchases. It was, of course, his
money in the main which they expended, but Jean also drew generously
on her small hoard. They vied with each other in planning little
surprises. Now the dentist would open some drawer and chance upon a kit
of tools for the household carpentering, in which his mechanical genius
reveled; or Jean would find her kitchen the richer for some new-fangled
ice-cream freezer, coffee-machine, or dish-washer which, in Paul's
unvarying phrase, "practically ran itself." They derived infinite
amusement also from the placing and replacing of their belongings--a
far knottier problem than any one save the initiate may conceive, since
the wall spaces of flats, as all flat-dwellers know, are ingeniously
designed to fit nothing which the upholsterer and the cabinet-maker
produce. Luckily they discovered this profound law early in their
buying, though not before Paul, adventuring alone among the "antique"
shops of Fourth Avenue, fell victim to an irresistible bargain in the
shape of a colonial sideboard which, joining forces with an equally
ponderous bargain of a table, blockaded their little dining room
almost to the exclusion of chairs.
Half the zest of all this lay in its secrecy; for although the
boarding-house suspected a love affair,--and broadly hinted its
suspicions,--it innocently supposed their frequent evenings out were
spent at the theaters. Quite another theory prevailed at the Lorna
Doone, however, as Jean learned to her dismay one Sunday when she was
addressed as "Mrs. Bartlett" by the portly owner, whom they passed in
the entrance hall.
"Oh, they've all along taken it for granted we're married," said Paul,
carelessly. "I thought it was too good a joke to spoil."
Jean did not see its humor.
"We must explain," she said.
"And be grinned at for a bride and groom! What's the use? It will be
true enough two weeks from now."
She privily decided that she would undeceive the owner at the first
opportunity, but the chance to speak had not presented itself when far
graver happenings brushed it from her thoughts as utterly as if it had
never been.