The Man Who Could Not Lose | Page 5

laugh at the editors!"
"Not half as loud as they will," said Carter.
With three thousand dollars in bank and three stories accepted and
seventeen still to hear from, and with Dolly daily telling him that it was
evident he did not love her, Carter decided they were ready, hand in
hand, to leap into the sea of matrimony. His interview on the subject
with Mrs. Ingram was most painful. It lasted during the time it took her
to walk out of her drawing-room to the foot of her staircase. She spoke
to herself, and the only words of which Carter was sure were

"preposterous" and "intolerable insolence." Later in the morning she
sent a note to his flat, forbidding him not only her daughter, but the
house in which her daughter lived, and even the use of the United
States mails and the New York telephone wires. She described his
conduct in words that, had they come from a man, would have afforded
Carter every excuse for violent exercise.
Immediately in the wake of the note arrived Dolly, in tears, and
carrying a dressing-case.
"I have left mother!" she announced. "And I have her car downstairs,
and a clergyman in it, unless he has run away. He doesn't want to marry
us, because he's afraid mother will stop supporting his flower mission.
You get your hat and take me where he can marry us. No mother can
talk about the man I love the way mother talked about you, and think I
won't marry him the same day!"
Carter, with her mother's handwriting still red before his eyes, and his
self-love shaken with rage flourished the letter.
"And no mother," he shouted, "can call ME a 'fortune-hunter' and a
'cradle-robber' and think I'll make good by marrying her daughter! Not
until she BEGS me to!"
Dolly swept toward him like a summer storm. Her eyes were wet and
flashing. "Until WHO begs you to?" she demanded. "WHO are you
marrying; mother or me?"
"If I marry you," cried Carter, frightened but also greatly excited, "your
mother won't give you a penny!"
"And that," taunted Dolly, perfectly aware that she was ridiculous, "is
why you won't marry me!"
For an instant, long enough to make her blush with shame and
happiness, Carter grinned at her. "Now, just for that," he said, "I won't
kiss you, and I WILL marry you!" But, as a matter of fact, he DID kiss
her. Then he gazed happily around his small sitting-room. "Make

yourself at home here," he directed, "while I pack my bag."
"I MEAN to make myself very much at home here," said Dolly joyfully,
"for the rest of my life."
From the recesses of the flat Carter called: "The rent's paid only till
September. After that we live in a hall bedroom and cook on a
gas-stove. And that's no idle jest, either."
Fearing the publicity of the City Hall license bureau, they released the
clergyman, much to the relief of that gentleman, and told the chauffeur
to drive across the State line into Connecticut.
"It's the last time we can borrow your mother's car," said Carter, "and
we'd better make it go as far as we can."
It was one of those days in May. Blue was the sky and sunshine was in
the air, and in the park little girls from the tenements, in white, were
playing they were queens. Dolly wanted to kidnap two of them for
bridesmaids. In Harlem they stopped at a jeweler's shop, and Carter got
out and bought a wedding-ring.
In the Bronx were dogwood blossoms and leaves of tender green and
beds of tulips, and along the Boston Post Road, on their right, the
Sound flashed in the sunlight; and on their left, gardens, lawns, and
orchards ran with the road, and the apple trees were masses of pink and
white.
Whenever a car approached from the rear, Carter pretended it was Mrs.
Ingram coming to prevent the elopement, and Dolly clung to him.
When the car had passed, she forgot to stop clinging to him.
In Greenwich Village they procured a license, and a magistrate married
them, and they were a little frightened and greatly happy and, they both
discovered simultaneously, outrageously hungry. So they drove
through Bedford Village to South Salem, and lunched at the Horse and
Hounds Inn, on blue and white china, in the same room where Major
Andre was once a prisoner. And they felt very sorry for Major Andre,

and for everybody who had not been just married that morning. And
after lunch they sat outside in the garden and fed lumps of sugar to a
charming collie and cream to a fat gray cat.
They decided to start housekeeping in Carter's flat, and so turned back
to New York,