He sought her hands, and linked, they smiled at each other until a passing man turned to look again, when Anne snatched her hands away, and with a whispered, "Good-by, dear," hurried into the building.
Roger waited half an hour and then went, disappointed.
Every noon hour Roger was waiting for Anne and they had lunch together at a nearby cafeteria which Anne insisted was the only kind of place she liked for lunch. For the rest of the hour they strolled on the sunny side of the street, or, if it were raw and foggy, sought some sheltered bench in one of the small plazas and talked. Roger usually did most of the talking, a running commentary on the people they passed, which linked the individuals up to society as a whole. Roger was always seeing people whom he pitied; starved, eager souls, thwarted longings, stunted minds, drudges in a mill whose working they did not understand, whose spiritual profits they did not share. When he pointed out these people and qualities to Anne, she understood, because she too had felt stifled and thwarted and full of vague, high longing. But she never quite understood how Roger understood, because he never seemed to long vaguely, nor to feel suppressed or driven. As the days slipped into weeks, Anne came to feel that there was a surplus of some qualities in Roger over and above the sum of those same qualities in herself. She had ideals and courage and faith, but his ideals were sharper before him, his courage deeper, his faith firmer.
Roger never doubted the best within himself, nor allowed a nervous over-conscientiousness to distort a quality into its reverse. If he had had a family, he long ago would have told them of his engagement, while Anne could not yet make up her mind what to do. Sometimes she saw her hesitancy as loyalty to Roger, because neither her father nor her mother would understand Roger or his standards. At others she felt that it was her own need for harmony and peace in the life about her, a need so deepgrown that it was a weakness in its inability to risk disturbance. And she knew how her father would accept a son-in-law who had no position, who talked of the world's misery as if it really did matter to him personally, who dallied with the prospect of a private secretaryship at fifty dollars a week to begin with because he could not quite prove to himself Hilary Wainwright's sincerity.
Sometimes, after an irritating day in the office, when old Mr. Wilmot dictated worse than usual and, on rehearing the letters, declared he had never used those words at all, Roger's begging to be allowed to come up in the evening and meet her people annoyed Anne almost to the point of confessing the main difficulty.
It was at the end of such a day, more than a month after she had promised to marry Roger, that she came down from the office almost wishing Roger would not be waiting. It was a June day of clear sunshine, but with a gusty wind straight from the ocean. The air was filled with dust that seeped through clothing and got into one's eyes and mouth and scratched one's nerves to snapping. But Roger was there, holding his hat on with one hand and making his happy little gesture of welcome with the other. Anne tried to smile cheerfully, but it was difficult with dust blowing into her face and a wind whipping her skirt about her. Roger came up quickly and took her arm.
"You mite of a thing. It always astonishes me to think of you getting about by yourself."
Anne was glad that a gust forced her to duck at that moment so that Roger did not see her unsmiling eyes. She was tired, sick of getting around by herself, of being respectful to that impossible old Mr. Brown, of keeping exact hours, every one a tiny bit snatched from the happy future of which Roger was so sure. It was one thing to refuse to work with John Lowell, or in the law at all because it was corrupt and unjust, but it was—to-night anyhow—just a bit overstrained to dally about over the possible insincerity of Hilary Wainwright. Whatever the man might be, at least he was doing real things for civic betterment, the kind of thing Roger seemed to believe in. If Hilary Wainwright's methods were not exactly Roger's, still it was an attempt. And she and Roger could marry.
They had crossed the street and now, in the temporary protection of a high building, were safe for a few moments from the wind. Anne could not go on with her head bent. She looked up into Roger's smiling eyes and succeeded in smiling back. His fingers closed over hers and drew her closer to him.