Gwenna had given a smile to the memory of a certain missing collar-stud that she had heard much of.
"Yes, I suppose to be allowed to find his collar-studs is what he'd consider 'Paradise enow' for any girl!" Leslie had mocked. "I misdoubt me that the Dampier boy would settle down after a year of marriage into a regular Sultan of the Hearthrug. Looking upon his wife as something that belongs to him, and goes about with him; like a portmanteau. Putting you in your place as 'less than the dust beneath his chariot,' that is, 'beneath his biplane wheels.'"
"Leslie! I shouldn't mind! I'd like to be! I believe it is my place," Gwenna had interrupted, lifting towards her friend a small face quivering with conviction. "He could make anything he liked or chose of me. What do I care——"
"Not for clothes flung down in rings all over the floor like when a trout's been rising? Nor for trousers left standing there like a pair of opera-glasses—or concertinas? Braces all tangled up on the gas-bracket? Overcoat and boots crushing your new hat on the bed? Seventeen holey socks for you to mend? All odd ones—for you to sort——"
Little Gwenna had cried out: "I'd want to!"
"I'm not afraid you won't get what you want," Leslie had said finally. "All I hope is that your wish won't fail when you get it!"
And of that Gwenna was never afraid.
"I should not care for him so much if he were not the only one who could make me so happy," she told herself; "and unless the woman's very happy, surely the man can't be. It must mean, then, that he'll feel, some day, that this would be the way to happiness. I'm sure there are some marriages that are different from what Leslie says. Some where you go on being sweethearts even after you're quite old friends, like. I—I could make it like that for him. I feel I could!"
Yes; she felt that some day (perhaps not soon) she must win him.
Sometimes she thought that this might be when her rival, the perfected machine, had made his name and absorbed him no longer. Sometimes, again, she told herself that he might have no success at all.