The car had arrived by this time and he swung her up to the platform. Like other moderns they were so accustomed to spend a large part of their time in being transported from place to place that they were quite at home in the noisy public conveyance, and after a pause to pay fares, remove wraps, and nod to an acquaintance or two, they went on with their conversation as though they were alone. People looked approvingly at the comely, well-dressed young couple, so naïvely absorbed in each other, and speculated as to whether they were just married or just about to be.
After they were deposited at the corner nearest the Emery house, the change to the silent street, up which they walked slowly, reluctant to separate, took them back to their first mood of this loveliest of all their hours together—the sweet intimacy of their first meeting in the new house.
Lydia felt herself so wholly in sympathy with Paul that she was moved to touch upon something that had never been mentioned between them. “Paul, dear,” she said, her certainty that he would understand, surrounding her with an atmosphere of spiritual harmony which she recognized was the thing in all the world which mattered most to her, “Paul dear, I never told you—there’s nothing to tell, really—but when I went to the Mallory’s house-party in February I rode from here to Hardville with Mr. Rankin and had a long talk with him. You don’t mind, do you?”
Her lover drew her hand within his arm and gave it an affectionate pressure. “You may not know things, Lydia, as you say, but you are the nicest girl! the straightest! I knew that at the time—Miss Burgess told me. But I’m glad you’ve given me a chance to say how sorry I was for you last autumn when everybody was pestering you so about him. I knew how you felt—better than you did, I’ll bet I did! I wasn’t a bit afraid. I knew you could never care for anybody but me. Why, you’re mine, Lydia, I’m yours, and that’s all there is to it. You know it as well as I do.”
“I know it when I’m with you,” she told him with a bravely honest, unspoken reservation.
He laughed his appreciation of her insistent sincerity. “Well, when you’re married won’t you be with me all the time? So that’s fixed! And as for meeting somebody by accident on the street-cars—why, you foolish darling, you’re not marrying a Turk, or an octopus—but an American.”
Lydia was silent, but her look was enough to fill the pause richly. She was savoring to the full the joy of close community of spirit which had been so rare in her pleasant life of material comfort, and she was saying a humble prayer that she might be good enough to be worthy of it, that she might be wise enough to make it the daily and hourly atmosphere of her life with Paul.
“What are you thinking about, darling?” asked the other.
“I was thinking how lovely it’s going to be to be really married and come to know each other well. We don’t know each other at all yet, really, you know.”
Paul was brought up short, as so often with Lydia, by an odd, disconcerted feeling, half pleasure, half shock, from the discovery in her of pages that he had not read, germs of ideas that had not come from him. “Why, darling Lydia, what do you mean? We know each other through and through!” he now protested. It gave a tang of the unexpected to her uniform sweetness, this always having a corner still to turn which kept her out of his sight. Paul was used to seeing most women achieve this effect of uncertainty by the use of coquetry, and in the free-and-easy give and take between young America of both sexes, he had learned with a somewhat cynical shrewdness to discount it. He entered into the game, but, in his own phrase, he always knew what he was about. Lydia, on the contrary, often penetrated his armor by one of these shafts, barbed by her complete unconsciousness of any intent. He felt now, with a momentary anguish, that he could never be sure of her belonging quite to him until they were married, and cried out upon her idea almost angrily, “I don’t know what you mean! We know each other now.”