Picking up the dropped threads of intercourse was not so easy as they had expected. It was hard for Tom to make himself believe that in this pretty little thing, all in white with pink roses in her hat, he was talking to his future wife. Since the fervor of his first love letter there had been a slight shift in his point of view. Without being able to locate the change, he felt that the new interests—the car, the inn-club, the variety of experience—had to some small degree crowded Maisie out. She was not quite so essential as she had seemed on the afternoon when he had learned of her departure. Neither was she quite so pretty. He thought with a pang that Honey's predictions might be coming true. Because they might be coming true, his pity was so great that he told her she was looking lovelier than ever.
"Gee, that's something," Maisie accepted, complacently. "With four brats to look after, and all the cooking and washing, and everything—if my father don't marry again soon I'll pass away." She glanced at his chauffeur's uniform. "You look swell."
He felt swell, and told her so. He told her of his wages, of the economies he hoped to make.
"Gee, and you talk of goin' to college, a fellow that can pull in all that money just by bein' a shofer. Why, if you were to go on bein' a shofer we could get married as soon as I got the family off my hands."
He explained to her that it was not the present, but the future for which he was working. A chauffeur had only a chauffeur's possibilities, whereas a man with an education....
"Just my luck to get engaged to a nut," Maisie commented, with forced resignation. "Gee, I got to laff."
Some half dozen times that summer, when errands took him to Boston, they met in the same way. Growing more accustomed to their new relation to each other, he also grew more tender as he realized her limitations and domestic cares. With his first month's wages in his hand, he could bring her little presents on each return from Boston, so helping out her never-failing joy in the flash of her big diamond. That at least she had, when every other blessing was put off to a vague future.
In August, the Ansleys came flying back, driven by the war. It had caught them at Munich, where their French chauffeur, Pierre, had been interned as a prisoner. While taking driving lessons Tom had made Pierre's acquaintance, and that he should now be a prisoner in Germany made the war a reality. For the first few weeks it had been like a battle among giants in the clouds; now it came down to earth as a convulsion among men.
The Ansleys had come to the inn-club because their own house was closed. With Guy and Hildred Tom found his relations changed by the fact that he was a chauffeur. Guy talked to him freely enough, as one young fellow to another, but Hildred had plainly received a hint to mark the distance between them. If she passed him in the grounds, or if he opened the car door for her, she gave him a faint, self-conscious smile, but never spoke to him. Mrs. Ansley freely used the car and him, always calling him Whitelaw.