She blushed so vividly that a sudden light burst upon me.
“Good heavens!” I exclaimed, “he does have my eyes and beard; but you didn’t see me. It isn’t possible—”
“But it is,” interrupted she, desperately. “With a mirror in the end of the car directly before me all the way from New York, do you suppose I could help seeing you! I’m sure you kept your eyes on me steadily enough to give me a good excuse.”
I whistled rudely; whereat she looked offended, and we went on from one thing to another until we had got up a very respectable quarrel indeed. There is nothing more conducive to a thoroughly good understanding between persons of opposite sex than a genuine quarrel; and having reached the point where there was no alternative but to separate in anger or to apologize, we chose the latter course, and having mutually humbled ourselves, after that got on capitally.
“It is my deliberate conviction,” she observed, when we at length got upon a footing sufficiently familiar for jesting, “that this story is really mine, and that you purloined it from me by some mysterious clairvoyance.”
“That may be,” I admitted. “I once guessed that a man was a bartender by the way he stirred his coffee at the steamer table, and that got me a very pretty reputation as a seer for a day or two; and very likely the truth is that I was all the time a mind-reader without knowing it.”
She smiled good-naturedly—more good-naturedly, indeed, than the jest deserved; and from that moment our acquaintance got on famously. The story was far from advancing as rapidly, however. A very brief time sufficed to reduce both versions of “April’s Lady” to hopeless confusion, but to build from the fragments a new and improved copy was a labor of much magnitude. Circumstances moreover, conspired to hinder our work. It was necessary that we verify our impressions of material we had used, and to do this we were obliged to attend the theatre together, to read together various poems, and together to hear a good deal of music. A little ingenuity, and a common inclination to prolong these investigations, effected so great a lengthening out that it was several months before we could even pretend to be ready to begin serious work upon the story; and even then we were far from agreeing in a number of important particulars.
“Agnes,” I remarked, one February evening, when we were on our way home from a concert to which we had boldly gone without even a pretence that it was in the remotest way connected with our literary project, “I fear we are becoming demoralized, and it seems to me the only hope of our ever completing ‘April’s Lady’ is to put everything else aside for the time being and give our minds to it. I can get my work arranged, and you can finish those articles for ‘The Quill’ by the middle of March. Then, we can be quietly married and go to some nice old-fashioned place—say St. Augustine—for a couple of months and get this magnum opus on paper at last.”
“As to being married,” returned she sedately, “have you considered that we could not possibly make a living, since we should inevitably be always writing the same things?”
“Why, that is my chief reason,” I retorted, “for proposing it. Think how awkward it is going to be if either of us marries somebody else, and then we write the same things. It is a good deal better to have our interests in common if our inventive faculty is to be so.”