Ive Married Marjorie | Page 2

out of the basket and throw it at her. "Coming back to
you!" she said softly. "Oh, you must be thrilled!" She put her head on
one side--she wore her hair in a shock of bobbed curls which Marjorie
loathed anyway, and they flopped when she wished to be
emphatic--and surveyed Marjorie with prolonged, tender interest. "Any
time now!" she breathed.
"Yes," said Marjorie desperately. "The ship will be in some time next
week. Yes, I'm thrilled. It's--it's wonderful. Thank you, Miss Kaplan, I
knew you would be sympathetic."
One hand was clenching and unclenching itself where Miss Kaplan,
fortunately a young person whose own side of emotions occupied her
exclusively, could not see it.
Miss Kaplan kissed her, quite uninvited, again, said "Dear little
war-bride!" and--just in time, Marjorie always swore, to save herself
from death, fled out.
It is all very well to be a war-bride when there's a war, but the war was
over.
"And I'm married," Marjorie said when the door had swung to behind
Miss Kaplan, "for life!"
She was twenty-one. She was little and slender, with a wistful, very
sweet face like a miniature; big dark-blue eyes, a small mouth that
tipped down a little at the indented corners, and a transparently rose and
white skin. She looked a great deal younger even than she was, and her
being Mrs. Ellison had amused every one, including herself, for the last
year she had used the name. As she sat down at her desk again, and
looked helplessly at the keen, dark young face surmounted by an
officer's cap, that for very shame's sake she had not taken away from
her desk, she looked like a frightened little girl. And she was
frightened.

It had been very thrilling, if scary, to be married to Francis Ellison,
when he wasn't around. The letters--the dear letters!--and the watching
for mails, and being frightened when there were battles, and wearing
the new wedding-ring, had made her perfectly certain that when Francis
came back she would be very glad, and live happily ever after. And
now that he was coming she was just plain frightened, suffocatingly,
abjectly scared to death.
"I mustn't be!" she told herself, trying to give herself orders to feel
differently. "I must be very glad!" But it was impossible to do anything
with herself. She continued to feel as if her execution was next week,
instead of her reunion with a husband who wrote that he was looking
forward to----
"If he didn't describe kissing me," shivered poor little Marjorie to
herself, "so accurately!"
She had met Francis just about a month before they were married. He
had come to see her with her cousin, who was in the same company at
Plattsburg. Her cousin was engaged to a dear friend of hers, and it had
made it very nice for all four of them, because Billy and Lucille weren't
war-fiancés by any means. They had been engaged for a couple of
years, in a more or less silent fashion, and the war had given them a
chance to marry. One doesn't think so much about ways and means
when the man is going to war and can send you an allotment.
Francis, dark, quick, decided, with a careless gaiety that was like that of
a boy let out from school, had been a delightful person to pair off with.
And then the other two had been so wrapped up in the wonderful
chance to get married which opened out before them, that marriage--a
beautiful, golden, romantic thing--had been in the air. One felt out of it
if one didn't marry. Everybody else was marrying in shoals. And
Francis had been crazy over little Marjorie from the moment he saw
her--over her old-fashioned, whimsical ways, her small defiances that
covered up a good deal of shyness, over the littleness and grace that
made him want to pick her up and pet her and protect her, he said . . .
Marjorie could remember, even yet, with pleasure, the lovely things he
had said to her in that tense way he had on the rare occasions when he

wasn't laughing. She had fought off marrying him till the very last
minute. And then the very day before the regiment sailed she had given
in, and the other two--married two weeks by then--had whisked her
excitedly through it. And then they'd recalled him--just two hours after
they were married, while Marjorie was sitting in the suite at the hotel,
with Francis kneeling down by her in his khaki, his arms around her
waist, looking up at her adoringly. She could see his face yet, uplifted
and intense, and the way it had turned to a mask when the knock came
that announced the telegram.
And it seemed now almost