“And as soon as we can afford it we’ll take a real swell apartment, with an elevator and a telephone girl.”
“And after that a place in the country—and a car.”
“I can’t imagine nothing more fun. Can you?”
Merlin fell silent a moment. He was thinking that he would have to give up his room, the fourth floor rear. Yet it mattered very little now. During the past year and a half—in fact, from the very date of Caroline’s visit to the Moonlight Quill—he had never seen her. For a week after that visit her lights had failed to go on—darkness brooded out into the areaway, seemed to grope blindly in at his expectant, uncurtained window. Then the lights had appeared at last, and instead of Caroline and her callers they showed a stodgy family—a little man with a bristly mustache and a full-bosomed woman who spent her evenings patting her hips and rearranging bric-a-brac. After two days of them Merlin had callously pulled down his shade.
No, Merlin could think of nothing more fun than rising in the world with Olive. There would be a cottage in a suburb, a cottage painted blue, just one class below the sort of cottages that are of white stucco with a green roof. In the grass around the cottage would be rusty trowels and a broken green bench and a baby-carriage with a wicker body that sagged to the left. And around the grass and the baby-carriage and the cottage itself, around his whole world there would be the arms of Olive, a little stouter, the arms of her neo-Olivian period, when, as she walked, her cheeks would tremble up and down ever so slightly from too much face-massaging. He could hear her voice now, two spoons’ length away:
“I knew you were going to say this tonight, Merlin. I could see—”
She could see. Ah—suddenly he wondered how much she could see. Could she see that the girl who had come in with a party of three men and sat down at the next table was Caroline? Ah, could she see that? Could she see that the men brought with them liquor far more potent than Pulpat’s red ink condensed threefold? …
Merlin stared breathlessly, half-hearing through an auditory ether Olive’s low, soft monologue, as like a persistent honeybee she sucked sweetness from her memorable hour. Merlin was listening to the clinking of ice and the fine laughter of all four at some pleasantry—and that laughter of Caroline’s that he knew so well stirred him, lifted him, called his heart imperiously over to her table, whither it obediently went. He could see her quite plainly, and he fancied that in the last year and a half she had changed, if ever so slightly. Was it the light or were her cheeks a little thinner and her eyes less fresh, if more liquid, than of old? Yet the shadows were still purple in her russet hair; her mouth hinted yet of kisses, as did the profile that came sometimes between his eyes and a row of books, when it was twilight in the bookshop where the crimson lamp presided no more.
And she had been drinking. The threefold flush in her cheeks was compounded of youth and wine and fine cosmetic—that he could tell. She was making great amusement for the young man on her left and the portly person on her right, and even for the old fellow opposite her, for the latter from time to time uttered the shocked and mildly reproachful cackles of another generation. Merlin caught the words of a song she was intermittently singing—
“Just snap your fingers at care,
Don’t cross the bridge ’til you’re there—”
The portly person filled her glass with chill amber. A waiter after several trips about the table, and many helpless glances at Caroline, who was maintaining a cheerful, futile questionnaire as to the succulence of this dish or that, managed to obtain the semblance of an order and hurried away. …
Olive was speaking to Merlin—
“When, then?” she asked, her voice faintly shaded with disappointment. He realized that he had just answered no to some question she had asked him.
“Oh, sometime.”
“Don’t you—care?”
A rather pathetic poignancy in her question brought his eyes back to her.
“As soon as possible, dear,” he replied with surprising tenderness. “In two months—in June.”
“So soon?” Her delightful excitement quite took her breath away.
“Oh, yes, I think we’d better say June. No use waiting.”
Olive began to pretend that two months was really too short a time for her to make preparations. Wasn’t he a bad boy! Wasn’t he impatient, though! Well, she’d show him he mustn’t be too quick with her. Indeed he was so sudden she didn’t exactly know whether she ought to marry him at all.
“June,” he repeated sternly.
Olive sighed and smiled and drank her coffee, her little finger lifted high above the others in true refined fashion. A stray thought came to Merlin that he would like to buy five rings and throw at it.
“By gosh!” he exclaimed aloud. Soon he would be putting rings on one of her fingers.
His eyes swung sharply to the right. The party of four had become so riotous that the headwaiter had approached and spoken to them. Caroline was arguing with this headwaiter in a raised voice, a voice so clear and young that it seemed as though the whole restaurant would listen—the whole restaurant except Olive Masters, self-absorbed in her new secret.
“How do you do?” Caroline was saying. “Probably the handsomest headwaiter in captivity. Too much noise? Very unfortunate. Something’ll have to be done about it. Gerald”—she addressed the man on her right—“the headwaiter says there’s too much noise. Appeals to us to have it stopped. What’ll I say?”
“Sh!” remonstrated Gerald, with laughter. “Sh!” and Merlin heard him add in an undertone: “All the bourgeoisie will be aroused. This is where the floorwalkers learn French.”
Caroline sat up straight
