Their way lay through the gloomiest and roughest part of the Seventh Ward. The neighborhood frightened her, and she clung closer to her escort. At one corner they passed some men in front of a liquor saloon.
"Look at dem! Look at dem! A sheeny fellar an' his bride, I'll betch ye!" shouted a husky voice. "Jes' comin' from de weddin'."
"She ain't no bigger 'n a peanut, is she?" The simile was greeted with a horse-laugh.
"Look a here, young fellar, what's de madder wid carryin' dat lady of yourn in your vest-pocket?"
"When Nathan and Goldy were a block away, something like a potato or a carrot struck her in the back. At the same time the gang of loafers on the corner broke into boisterous merriment. Nathan tried to face about, but she restrained him.
"Don't! They might kill you!" she whispered, and relapsed into silence.
He made another attempt to disengage himself, as if for a desperate attack upon her assailants, but she nestled close to his side and held him fast, her every fibre tingling with the consciousness of the shelter she had in him.
"Don't mind them, Nathan," she said.
And as they proceeded on their dreary way through a sombre, impoverished street, with here and there a rustling tree,—a melancholy witness of its better days,—they felt a stream of happiness uniting them, as it coursed through the veins of both, and they were filled with a blissful sense of oneness the like of which they had never tasted before. So happy were they that the gang behind them, and the bare rooms toward which they were directing their steps, and the miserable failure of the wedding, all suddenly appeared too insignificant to engage their attention,—paltry matters alien to their new life, remote from the enchanted world in which they now dwelt.
The very notion of a relentless void abruptly turned to a beatific sense of their own seclusion, of there being only themselves in the universe, to live and to delight in each other.