“Oh—I’ll find somebody,” answered Ralston, confidently. “They all say it’s easy enough to be married in New York, but that it’s awfully hard to be divorced.”
“All the better!” laughed Katharine. “By the bye—what time is it?”
“Five minutes to eleven,” answered Ralston, looking at his watch.
“Dear me! And at eleven I’m due at Mr. Crowdie’s for my portrait. I shall be late. Go and see about finding a clergyman while I’m at the studio. It can’t be helped.”
Ralston glanced at her in surprise. Of her sitting for her portrait he had not heard before.
“I must say,” he answered, “you don’t seem inclined to waste time this morning—”
“Certainly not! Why should we lose time? We’ve lost a whole year already. Do you think I’m the kind of girl who has to talk everything over fifty times to make up her mind? When you came, day before yesterday, I’d decided the whole matter. And now I mean—yes, you may look at me and laugh, Jack—I mean to put it through. I’m much more energetic than you seem to think. I believe you always imagined I was a lazy, pokey, moony sort of girl, with too much papa and mamma and weak tea and buttered toast in her nature. I’m not, you know. I’m just as energetic for a girl as you are for a man.”
“Rather more so,” said Ralston, watching her with intense admiration of her strong and beautiful self, and with considerable indifference to what she was saying, though her words amused him. “Please tell me about Crowdie and the portrait.”
“Oh—the portrait? Mr. Crowdie wants to paint it for Hester. I’m going to sit the first time this morning. That’s all. Here we are at the corner. We must cross here to get over to Lafayette Place.”
“Well, then,” said Ralston, as they walked on, “there’s only one more point, and that’s to find a clergyman. I suppose you can’t suggest anybody, can you?”