III
What happened after that Ikey could never clearly remember. Bits of the ensuing conversation came back to her, memories of the sickening rage, the stupefying bewilderment that possessed her, and the exhaustion that followed. But order there was none. And she was sure she never got the whole of it.
At one stage in the proceedings she had observed in a haughty voice that she did not care to have his sympathy—or pity—take that form.
"Oh, it's not that," he assured her pleasantly; "but I'm tired of knocking around the world alone. I need an anchor. I think you"—he looked at her impersonally, but politely—"would make a good anchor."
"You mean you want me to reform you!"
He smiled a careful smile.
"No-o. I don't feel the need of reforming. There's nothing the matter with me——"
"How lovely to have such a high opinion of oneself."
"Yes. Isn't it? But as I was saying——"
At another stage she tried to take refuge behind the usual platitude: she did not love him.
He considered this—at ease before her, his hands in his pockets.
"Well, when it comes to that, I don't love you, either"—Ikey gasped—"but I don't consider that that makes any difference."
Another break.
Then, "What'll you do, if you don't?" he had asked her in a businesslike manner. "You're just on the verge of a breakdown"—She knew it; and his tone of conviction did not add to her sense of security—"Another scene like to-day's would upset you completely. You say you have no friends or relatives here; and there's no one you want to go to away from here. And besides, I can look after you a great deal better than you can look after yourself."
There must have been much arguing after that. There must have; for she had not the slightest intention of being disposed of in this medieval fashion. But in the midst of some determined though shaky sentence of hers, he had said quite kindly and finally that they need not discuss the matter any further—besides, she had to have a good stiff lunch right off—and had piloted her carefully, but with no over-powering air of devotion, out of the empty lots, around the corner, and into an automobile.
"It was all the fault of that wretched beefsteak," mourned Ikey an hour or two later. "If I'd only had it before, it never would have happened—never. I shall always have a grudge against it. What am I to do now?"
The automobile had conveyed them smoothly, first, to a clergyman's, of all people; next, to a restaurant; then, to the boarding-house, where her few belongings had found their way into a telescope basket; and now it was conveying them through the bedraggled outskirts of the city into the country beyond.
A hatchet-faced chauffeur was manipulating things in front; while the unspeakable man in gray sat unemotionally beside her in the tonneau and looked the other way.
"What am I to do now?" The bewildered girl found no answer to the one question of her mind. "Why don't you faint?" she asked herself severely. "Why don't you faint? If you had an idea of helping me out of this pickle, you'd do it at once, and never come to at all, and then have brain fever. It's the only decent solution. Instead of that, here you are, feeling—actually comfortable."
She stared ahead of her with miserable eyes.
"It was all that miserable beefsteak. The thing must have been six inches thick. Beast; why couldn't he have taken me to the restaurant first? Then I'd never have gone to the clergyman's. And that license. Where did he get it? We never stopped for one—he just pulled it out of his pocket, as though it had been a handkerchief. Ikey, you're married, married—do you quite understand?—to a man who wears ready-made clothes and doesn't love you and lives in an attic boarding-house bed-room. And what is he doing with this automobile? And what is his business? Oh, he's probably a chauffeur; and he's borrowed his employer's bubble; and this other chauffeur in front's his best friend and ashamed of him on account of the beefsteak business. He'd better be. But what shall I say to him? What shall I say?—Oh—h"—heaven-sent inspiration—"I'll say nothing at all. I will be—so different."
On and on and on went the machine. The girl closed her eyes upon the dusty, dun-colored landscape.
"Serves me right for turning over my bank account to Cousin Mary and—and——"
She had fallen asleep, propped up in her corner of the machine—worn out by this climax to the weeks that had gone before.
The man at her side turned and looked at her. His face no longer wore its placidly and conventionally polite expression.