As Norman awakened, he reached for the telephone, said to the boy in charge of the club exchange: "Look in the book, find the number of a lawyer named Branscombe, and connect me with his office." After some confusion and delay he got the right office, but Dorothy was out at lunch. He left a message that she was to call him up at the club as soon as she came in. He was shaving when the bell rang.
He was at the receiver in a bound. "Is it you?" he said.
"Yes," came in her quiet, small voice.
"Will you resign down there to-day? Will you marry me this afternoon?"
A brief silence, then—"Yes."
Thus it came about that they met at the City Hall license bureau, got their license, and half an hour later were married at the house of a minister in East Thirty-third Street, within a block of the Subway station. He was feverish, gay, looked years younger than his thirty-seven. She was quiet, dim, passive, neither grave nor gay, but going through her part without hesitation, with much the same patient, plodding expression she habitually bore as she sat working at her machine—as if she did not quite understand, but was doing her best and hoped to get through not so badly.
"I've had nothing to eat," said he as they came out of the parsonage.
"Nor I," said she.
"We'll go to Delmonico's," said he, and hailed a passing taxi.
On the way, he sitting in one corner explained to her, shrunk into the other corner: "I can confess now that I married you under false pretenses. I am not prosperous, as I used to be. To be brief and plain, I'm down and out, professionally."