“Hurting me?” he asked, puzzled.
“Yes, hurting you! Don’t you remember that night just after you came back from Paris and I left you so abruptly at dinner?” He nodded. “I told you then there was no use of your seeing me, that there could never be anything between us. That’s why I’ve deliberately done everything I could to make you angry at me, tired of me, so exasperated you would go your way and I mine—”
“But, Mimi, don’t you love me? Look at me! Tell me you don’t love me, and I’ll not say another word!”
He seized her by the arms and turned her around so that they faced each other. She looked directly at him.
“That’s just the trouble, Jimmie, I do love you—love you as I’ve never loved before—love you as I know I’ll never love again. That’s just the reason you and I must have this talk and then end our friendship—” Her eyes filled slowly with tears as she pulled her arms free. He looked dazed, puzzled, distrait, and let her go.
“You love me? Therefore we’ve got to end everything here? Tell me, Mimi, what is back of all this?”
Mimi dashed the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand, her handkerchief gone and she too upset to look for it. Determination replaced the expression of pain.
“Here is what is back of it! I told you that you didn’t know anything about me or my life—” she began.
“But I do. Mrs. Crosby has given me your whole history, she went to Francine for what she herself didn’t know already.”
“But neither Mrs. Crosby nor Francine knows anything about me before I went to Francine’s eight years ago to work. And there’s a lot in my life back of that, I’m going to tell you the whole story and then you’ll see why—”
Jimmie shook off his lethargy, his air of supplication.
“Mimi, you’ll do nothing of the sort,” he said firmly. “I know you—and that’s enough for me. Whatever it is you’re worried about, I know you well enough to know that the things you’re trying to magnify into an insurmountable barrier between us were done through no fault of yours. You’re too fine, too decent—”
“No—no, Jimmie,” she cried, “you must let me finish—”
“There’ll be no finishing. You and I both will be much happier if we just let that drop—dropped for all time. If you told me and we married, you’d feel all the rest of your life that I was holding against you what you want to tell me now. Or that you’d been mighty foolish in worrying about it at all. And your trying to tell me just proves what I said about your being fine and decent—if you’d been less than that, you’d never have let it worry you at all. There’s never been the slightest thing against you—you can bet your life Mrs. Crosby would have found it—and she thinks you are the most marvellous person she’s ever met!”
“But, Jimmie—” Mimi made one last, despairing effort to stop him.
“But nothing, Mimi. There’s just one thing that counts now, nothing else in the world matters. I love you and you love me—oh, darling, I do love you so!” he almost cried softly as he took her in his arms and prevented utterance of any other words from her lips with his own. …
They were married on Thanksgiving Day—“those old Puritans who started this custom never knew what wise birds they were!” Jimmie gaily remarked when they came out of the church into the crisp November sunlight. The Crosbys gave a most elaborate wedding breakfast for them in their Park Avenue apartment—even in her happiness Mimi felt she was in a fantastic curio shop. Just a few friends, Mrs. Crosby had said when she asked the privilege of furnishing the bridal breakfast. There sat down some sixty guests and the supply of Veuve Clicquot and Pommery Sec seemed inexhaustible.
“I’ve got a cunning little surprise for you, Mimi,” Mrs. Crosby coyly whispered. “I know you’ll like it, for you told me you did. You and dear Jimmie run into the library and look at it all by your own little selves.” They did look. It was the marble monstrosity of Cupids and bows and arrows Mrs. Crosby had bought in Paris from the romantic-looking sculptor with “the big, dark eyes and long hair and the sweetest velvet jacket.” But Mr. Crosby, gruff and kindly and intensely practical, gave them a cheque—“You youngsters’ll know what you want better’n an old man like me—get what you want with it.”
Madame Francine wept throughout the ceremony and her tears were because she loved Mimi and not—well, not very much because she did not know what she would do now that Mimi was going to leave the shop. Mimi had wanted to keep on working but Jimmie had been adamant. “You’ve worked long enough already—now you’re going to play!” he had declared, and there was no changing his mind. Jimmie’s mother was there, white-haired and kindly and self-effacing, but she had kissed Mimi tenderly and said: “My dear, you’re the only woman I’ve ever seen who’s good enough for my Jimmie!” Jimmie became mildly tipsy from the imbibing of many glasses of champagne drunk as toasts, and the breakfast was yet in progress, that is, the liquid portion of it, when Mimi, more lovely than ever in a coral green gown with a hat to match which Madame Francine herself had designed, slipped away with Jimmie at three in the afternoon.
XXI
The Forrester house sat on the north side of Washington Square. Its high-ceiled walls and hand-carved woodwork, its air of mellowed age were all redolent of days when coaches-and-fours rolling easily through the Square sent flocks of broad-winged pigeons fluttering to safety on the huge, clumsy arch which took its name from the Square. Mimi loved the old-fashioned house it spoke
