He waited till the elevator had descended before he tapped. Probably she was listening for him, fearing and yet hoping for the pressure of his arms and all the newness that they would begin together. He would read in her eyes the writing of surrender—the same writing that he had read on the dusty panes of childhood, “I love you. I love you.”
He tapped; he tapped more loudly. The door was opened ty Mr. Dak. “Hulloa! Come in.”
“Where’s Desire?”
“In her room getting ready.”
“Ready? For what?”
They entered the dim-lit room where the most splendid moment of life should have been happening.
“Didn’t you know?” Mr. Dak appeared not to notice his emotion. “Everybody else knew. There’s a supper-party to Miss Audrey. Just the six of us.”
They fell to making conversation. Mr. Dak did most of the talking. Teddy found himself agreeing to the statement that Christianity was a colossal blunder, and that Mohammedanism was the only religion worth the having. He would have agreed to anything. As he listened for Desire’s footstep, he nodded his head, saying, “Yes. Of course. Obviously.” All the while he was aware of the embarrassed kindness that looked out from the eyes of the little man. Somewhere, in the silence of his brain, a voice kept questioning, “Mr. Dak, are you in love with Vashti? Does she laugh at you when you try to tell her? Do you wish the world was pagan because then you’d be her lord and master?”
“In the Mohammedan faith,” Mr. Dak was saying, “a woman’s hope of immortality lies in merging her life with a man’s.”
Then he set himself to criticize pedantically the breakdown of the Christian ideal of marriage.