It was something to be in the room she occupied, to see the furniture she used.
I seated myself in her chair—the one I had seen her in—but almost instantly rose and walked about. My nerves were too much on edge to permit me to remain long without motion of some kind. At the end of half an hour I began to grow incensed again. She had made the appointment for ten o'clock. She knew from previous experience that I would keep it to the moment. Trains from the suburbs ran frequently enough. Did she consider me merely a puppet, to be played with?
Between half-past ten and eleven I was a hundred times on the point of descending the stairs and leaving the house, ending the whole affair.
But I didn't.
She came about ten minutes past eleven, with many expressions of regret at having kept me waiting. The timepiece at the house of her friend had broken its mainspring, or something of the sort, and with the carelessness of a woman she had forgotten to wind her watch the evening before. The family were all deceived by the fact that the sky was cloudy. When she reached her station the train had just gone and she was obliged to wait three-quarters of an hour for another. As soon as she alighted in New York, she took a cab and bade the driver hasten. Had I been waiting very long?
I did not know, at that instant, whether I had been a minute or a week, and I did not care. It was enough that I was again in her presence—that she had actually arrived. I begged her to say nothing more about it.
"I have kept the cab," she said, looking me full in the face, "thinking you might be kind enough to go with me to the shops and help me pick out my things. If it isn't asking too much—"
I assured her it would give me the greatest pleasure to accept the invitation and that I had no engagement so important as helping her to get ready for our journey. With a smile, she took off her hat and arranged her hair at the mirror, with a few passes of the brush and comb. Then she put it on again and said she was quite ready.
"Drive to Altman's," she said to the cabman, as she stepped inside the vehicle.
We were together, side by side. Had we been on the way to the steamer nothing could have exceeded my delight. These preliminaries all tended in that direction, however, and I was fain to curb my haste and content myself with the present.