"Not prematurely delighted, I hope, good friend. At this moment I find myself believing that the perils of the sea are nothing to certain perils of the land. Goodbye."
"Goodbye. Don't lose confidence in your lucky number—even if you do call it a 'disparity!'"
It would have been the obvious thing for Laura, after her telephone conversation with Blythe, to at least intimate to Louise that she was upon the verge of an event quite universally and correctly deemed of considerable importance in a young woman's life—her first proposal. Most women in Laura's place would have done so. But Laura's dislike for the obvious was almost a part of her religion. She had none of the benevolent marplot in her composition. She made it a point never to interfere with symmetrical sequences. Her own unhappy marital experience had by no means bereft her of sentiment; and she felt that a girl about to receive an offer of marriage should be entitled to enjoy the surprise—and in this case she knew it would be a surprise—inhering to so important an occasion. So Laura, although she visited Louise in her room after her telephone talk with Blythe, said nothing about it; but she craftily intimated, in order that Louise might look her best, that she would not be greatly surprised if Blythe were to drop in. The intimation was sufficient. Louise, a very human woman, promptly proceeded, as soon as Laura returned to her own quarters, to correct even her most trifling disarrays; so that when Blythe (astonishingly conforming to Laura's prophecy, Louise thought) arrived she looked very lovely in a one-piece dress of Quaker-grey rajah, with a band of grey velvet, which somehow suggested to Blythe the insignia of a princess, around her wonderful hair. She was at the piano, striving, soft pedal down, to extract musical sense from Strauss' "Salome" (impossible task!) when Blythe came in.
He noticed her grey dress at once.
"It is a comfort to have such a tractable, obedient ward," he said, studying the dress approvingly when she rose to greet him. "Here, a little less than a week after I threatened to insist upon your adopting the Quaker garb, I find that you've voluntarily assumed it—the color, at any rate. I know some guardians who would envy me."
Louise, quickly at ease—which had been Blythe's purpose in beginning with persiflage—smiled with a woman's usual deprecation of a complimented costume.
"Seeing that I have had this dress for more than a year," she said, "my obedience must have become an unconscious habit before I knew you."
Blythe, a trained hand at sparring, took advantage of the opening.
"Before you knew me, perhaps, Louise," he said. "But not before I knew you. Aren't you forgetting that I knew you when you still believed in Kris Kringle and Hans Andersen?" He sighed with rather too smiling an assumption of melancholy. "That reflection, I confess, makes me feel pretty aged."