"So we have! It didn't seem but a few blocks, did it?" Roger looked so bewildered at the sight of the City Hall just before him, that Anne laughed.
"Seeming is not being. There it is and I'll have to take a car right straight back."
She moved, but suddenly Roger's hand held her arm and, at the strange look on his face, Anne's eyes grew serious.
"Princess, let's go over and get the license now. It doesn't mean much—but I would like to feel we'd gotten that far."
"Why! Roger! Now, this minute?"
Roger nodded. "Will you, dear?"
Under his look, Anne colored. She tried to say something flippant but could not.
"All right," she whispered finally.
They crossed the street and went up the steps into the rather dirty corridor, along which fat, red-faced politicians and young clerks hurried. In the license office, a bored clerk, just about to leave for his delayed lunch, rushed them through the questions. Anne held up her right hand and swore. Then Roger. The clerk scribbled in the answers. Roger paid the fee. They turned away, as legally two as when they had entered.
But to Anne, something had happened, so that never again would she be the Anne Mitchell who had come up the steps only a few moments before. All the weeks of her hidden secret had not made her feel so irrevocably Roger's as this: a few stereotyped questions gabbled by a bored clerk, the unimportant fact of her age sworn to with ridiculous solemnity. The personal quality of her secret had been hers, even through the ordeal with her parents, but now, it was not hers any longer. It had been given to the world. This bored, gum-chewing clerk had placarded her name and Roger's for the world to see. She and Roger were now tagged and listed, in orthodox fashion, for the great event of matrimony. She began to tremble.