Ive Married Marjorie | Page 4

seemed so like story-books when she
got the letters. His being so changed made it real for the first time. . . .
And then an unworthy feeling--as if she simply could not face the
romantic and tender eyes of all the office--everybody having the same
feelings about her that Miss Kaplan had, even if they were well-bred
enough to phrase them politely.
"Shall we go?" she asked abruptly, while this feeling was strong in her.
"Not for a minute. I want to see the place where my wife has spent her
last year . . ."
He stood with his arm still around her--would he never stop touching
her?--and surveyed the office with the same sort of affectionate
amusement he might have given to a workbasket of hers, or a piece of
embroidery. Marjorie slipped from under his arm and put her hat on.
"I'm ready now," she said.
They walked out of the little office, and through the long aisle down the
center of the floor of the office-building, Marjorie, still miserably
conscious of the eyes, and the emotions behind the eyes, and quite as
conscious that they were emotions that she ought to be ashamed of
minding.
"Now where shall we go for luncheon?" demanded Francis joyously, as
they got outside. He caught her hand in his surreptitiously and said

"You darling!" under his breath. For a minute the old magic of his swift
courtship came back to her, and she forgot the miserable oppression of
facing fifty years of wedded life with a stranger; and she smiled up at
him. Then, as he caught her hand in his, quite undisguisedly this time,
and held it under his arm, the repulsion came back.
"Anywhere you like," she answered his question.
"We'll go to the biggest, wildest, wooliest place in the city, where the
band plays the most music," he announced. "Going to celebrate. Come
on, honey. And then I have a fine surprise for you, as soon as we go
back to the flat. Lucille won't be back till five, will she? And thank
goodness for that!"
Lucille and Marjorie, pending the return of their husbands, shared a
tiny flat far uptown on the west side. Marjorie had described it at length
in her letters, until Francis had said that he could find his way around it
if he walked in at midnight. But his intimacy with it made her feel that
there was no place on earth she could call her own.
"Tell me now," she demanded.
Francis laughed again, and shook his head.
"It will do you good to guess. Come now, which--Sherry's or the Plaza
or the Ritz?"
"Sherry's--they're going to close it soon, poor old place!"
"Then we'll celebrate its obsequies," said Francis, grinning cheerfully.
Before he went he had smiled, somehow, as if he had been to a very
excellent college and a super-fine prep school of many traditions--as,
indeed, he had--but now it was exactly the grin, Marjorie realized, still
with a feeling of unworthiness, of the soldier, sailor, and marine
grinning so artlessly from the War Camp Community posters. In his
year of foreign service, Francis had shaken off the affectations of his
years, making him, at twenty-five, a much older and more valuable

man than Marjorie had parted with. But she didn't like it, or what she
glimpsed of it. Whether he was gay in this simple, new way, or grave in
the frighteningly old one, he was not the Francis she had built up for
herself from a month's meetings and a few memories.
He smiled at her flashingly again as they settled themselves at the little
table in just the right spot and place they had chosen.
"Wondering whether I'll eat with my knife?" he demanded, quite at
random as it happened, but altogether too close to Marjorie's feelings to
be comfortable.
She colored up to her hair.
"No--no! I know you wouldn't do that!" she asseverated so earnestly
that he went off into another gale of affectionate laughter.
And then he addressed himself to the joyous task of planning a
luncheon that they would never of them either forget, he said. He took
the waiter into their confidence to a certain degree, and from then on a
circle of silent and admiring service inclosed them.
"But you needn't think we're going to linger over it, Marjorie," he
informed her. "I want to get up to where you live, and be alone with
you."
"Of course," said Marjorie mechanically, saying a little prayer to the
effect that she needed a great deal of help to get through this situation,
and she hoped it would come in sight soon. She could not eat very
much. It was all very good, and the band played ravishingly to the ears
of Francis,