She was leaning forward, her elbow on the casement of the open window of the brougham, her cheek against her hand; the moonlight was glistening on her round, firm forearm and on her serious face. “How far, far away from—everything it seems here!” she said, her voice tuned to that soft, clear light, “and how beautiful it is!” Then, addressing the moon and the shadows of the trees rather than me: “I wish I could go on and on—and never return to—to the world.”
“I wish we could,” said I.
My tone was low, but she started, drew back into the brougham, became an outline in the deep shadow. In another mood that might have angered me. Just then it hurt me so deeply that to remember it to-day is to feel a faint ache in the scar of the long-healed wound. My face was not hidden as was hers; so, perhaps, she saw. At any rate, her voice tried to be friendly as she said: “Well—I have crossed the Rubicon. And I don't regret. It was silly of me to cry. I thought I had been through so much that I was beyond such weakness. But you will find me calm from now on, and reasonable.”
“Not too reasonable, please,” said I, with an attempt at her lightness. “A reasonable woman is as trying as an unreasonable man.”
“But we are going to be sensible with each other,” she urged, “like two friends. Aren't we?”
“We are going to be what we are going to be,” said I. “We'll have to take life as it comes.”
That clumsy reminder set her to thinking, stirred her vague uneasiness in those strange circumstances to active alarm. For presently she said, in a tone that was not so matter-of-course as she had tried to make it: “We'll go now to my Uncle Frank's. He's a brother of my father's. I always used to like him best—and still do. But he married a woman mama thought—queer. They hadn't much, so he lives away up on the West Side—One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street.”
“The wise plan, the only wise plan,” said I, not so calm as she must have thought me, “is to go to my partner's house and send for a minister.”
“Not to-night,” she replied nervously. “Take me to Uncle Frank's, and to-morrow we can discuss what to do and how to do it.”
“To-night,” I persisted. “We must be married to-night. No more uncertainty and indecision and weakness. Let us begin bravely, Anita!”