Dick smiled at her blandly. “You look just as lovely as usual. In fact I like you best of all in plain dark things. Didn’t some violets come?”
“They were in the dressing-room too, behind that miserable dog. If Jim ever comes—I must sit somewhere back in a corner.”
“You must sit there with me beside you.” Dick pointed to a chair in the front of the box.
“Don’t you really mind?” demanded Eleanor. “Of course the stockings are the worst, and they won’t show——”
“I asked you to come to our very own party,” Dick told her, “not your clothes. I’ve got plenty of clothes here already. Come and meet them, and tell them about the horrid Peter Pan. Did he chew up your entire wardrobe while you were out?”
It was a very funny story when once you were free to see it that way. The dull devoted couples got quite hysterical over it. Jim, when he came, was almost as bad, though he assured his sister soberly that she had done very well to “play safe” when Peter Pan was low in his mind.
“Most girls think all a man cares for is clothes,” said Dick, as the orchestra played with lowered lights waiting for the first curtain.
“And most men think a girl cares only for flowers and candy and suppers.”
“Before the wedding—and clothes and servants and all the luxuries she’s used to afterward,” added Dick a little bitterly.
“Whereas,” Eleanor took him up, “if a girl loves a man, she is willing to do without all but the plainest, simplest necessities. What she wants is a chance to help him, to be with him through thick and thin, to watch him make good, and to feel that she has a little bit of a share in the fine things he’s doing and going to do.”