Ive Married Marjorie | Page 4

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, who sent buoyantly across and demanded such tunes as he was fondest of. There was one which they played to which he sang, under his breath, a profane song which ran in part:
"And we'll all come home And get drunk on ginger pop-- For the slackers voted the country dry While we went over the top."
And then, when the meal was two-thirds over, Marjorie wished she