He could hardly let her go back for supper, although she had promised. A dizzying intemperance drove on his tongue. "I wish I could keep you, now that I have you here," and his eyes dwelt upon her alluring shapeliness; her gaze was intently busied with the panorama of uninspired villas. "You don't know what knowing you has meant to me, Jane. I was in the dumps over the whole business...."
"It's mutual, Pelham. The iron city has chiefly solid iron headpieces, I think. You were a rare find."
He chuckled. "You make the thing too intellectual, at that. I assure you that I wouldn't offer to elope with a suffrage tract, or a skirted treatise on socialism. My offer holds good, if you're willing." Playfully he increased the speed.
"Lauderdale isn't Barkis," she temporized. "Have you known me four weeks, or five?"
"So romance perishes, as the lady grows arithmetical! Love can't be weighed on the iceman's scales."
"Nor can mental dynamite blast it out, Mr. Miner. Modern marriage isn't a thing to venture lightly. Love's blindness was once thought a blessing——"
"It's often a mercy," he slipped in.
"To-day's surgery is curing the blindness. It's all right to mate as birds do, if people could part as easily. But when a heart must be pledged, not only to honeymoon days, but to the petty irks, and the tedious astronomical study of the skyhigh cost of living——It needs reflection."
"You might give me a croûton of comfort. The especial heart I sit beside isn't pledged elsewhere, I hope?"
"Now, really——"