“We’d go and get a license. Then we’d find a minister. After that I should give you something to eat, and then I’d take you home.”
“Where would that be?”
He gave her his address in East Sixty-seventh Street, only a few doors from Fifth Avenue, but her social sophistication was not up to the point of seeing the significance of this. Neither did her imagination try to picture the home or to see it otherwise than as an alternative to the police-station, or worse, as a lodging for the night.
“And what would happen to me when I got to your home?”
“You’d have your own room. I shouldn’t interfere with you. You’d hardly ever see me. You could stay as long as you liked or as short as you liked, after the first week or two.”
There was that about him which carried conviction. She believed him. As an alternative to having nowhere to go, what he offered her was something, and something with that spice of adventure of which she had been dreaming only a few minutes earlier. She couldn’t be worse off than she was now, and if it gave her the chance of a hand-to-hand tussle with the world-pride which had never done anything but look down on her, she would be fighting what she held as her worst enemy. She braced herself to say,
“All right; I’ll do it.”
He, too, braced himself. “Very well! Let’s start.”
The impetuosity of his motion almost took her breath away as she tried to keep pace with him.