It was a happy time, untroubled by the thought of money that was soon
to be so important. Bert's various aunts and cousins sent him checks,
and Nancy's stepmother sent her all her own mother's linen and silver,
and odd pieces of mahogany on which the freight charges were frightful,
and laces and an oil portrait or two. The trousseau was helped from all
sides, every week had its miracle; and the hats, and the embroidered
whiteness, and the smart street suit and the adorable kitchen ginghams
accumulated as if by magic. Bert's mother sent delightfully monogrammed
bed and table-linen, almost weekly. Nancy said it was preposterous for
poor people to start in with such priceless possessions!
Among the happy necessities of the time was the finding of a proper
apartment. Nancy and Bert spent delightful Saturdays and Sundays
wandering in quest of it; beginning half-seriously in February, when it
seemed far too early to consider this detail, and continuing with
augmented earnestness through the three succeeding months. Eventually
they got both tired and discouraged, and felt dashed in the very
opening of their new life, but finally the place was found, and they
loved it instantly, and leased it without delay. It was in a new
apartment house, in East Eleventh Street, four shiny and tiny rooms, on
a fourth floor. Everything was almost too compact and convenient, Nancy
thought; the ice box, gas stove, dumb-waiter, hanging light over the
dining table, clothes line, and garbage chute, were already in place.
It left an ambitious housekeeper small margin for original arrangement,
but of course it did save money and time. The building was of pretty
cream brick, clean and fresh, the street wide, and lined with dignified
old brownstone houses, and the location perfect. She smothered a dream
of wide old-fashioned rooms, quaintly furnished in chintzes and white
paint. They had found no such enchanting places, except at exorbitant
rents. Seventy-five dollars, or one hundred dollars, were asked for the
simplest of them, and the plumbing facilities, and often the janitor
service, were of the poorest. So Nancy abandoned the dream, and
enthusiastically accepted the East Eleventh Street substitute, Bert
becoming a tenant in the "George Eliot," at a rental of thirty-five
dollars a month. Some of the old Barrett furniture was too large for
the place, but what she could use Nancy arranged with exquisite taste:
fairly dancing with pleasure over the sitting room, where her chair and
Bert's were in place, and the little droplight lighted on the little
table. In this room they were going to read Dickens out loud, on winter
nights.
They were married on a hot April morning, a morning whose every second
seemed to Nancy flooded with strange perfumes, and lighted with
unearthly light. The sky was cloudless; the park bowered in fresh
green; the streets, under new shadows, clean-swept and warm. Her gown
was perfection, her new wide hat the most becoming she had ever worn;
the girls, in their new gowns and hats, seemed so near and dear to her
to-day. She was hardly conscious of Bert, but she remembered liking his
big brother, who kissed her in so brotherly a fashion. Winter was over,
the snow was gone at last, the trying and depressing rains and the cold
were gone, too, and she and Bert were man and wife, and off to Boston
for their honeymoon.