“No!” he almost shouted, bringing his fist fiercely down upon the table. “May it last forever!”
“What?”
“I mean—oh, I see what you mean. You’re right. May it be a short one.” He laughed and added, “My error.”
After the wine arrived they discussed the matter thoroughly.
“We’ll have to take a small apartment at first,” he said, “and I believe, yes, by golly, I know there’s a small one in the house where I live, a big room and a sort of a dressing-room-kitchenette and the use of a bath on the same floor.”
She clapped her hands happily, and he thought how pretty she was really, that is, the upper part of her face—from the bridge of the nose down she was somewhat out of true. She continued enthusiastically:
“And as soon as we can afford it we’ll take a real swell apartment, with an elevator and a telephone girl.”
“And after that a place in the country—and a car.”
“I can’t imagine nothing more fun. Can you?”
Merlin fell silent a moment. He was thinking that he would have to give up his room, the fourth floor rear. Yet it mattered very little now. During the past year and a half—in fact, from the very date of Caroline’s visit to the Moonlight Quill—he had never seen her. For a week after that visit her lights had failed to go on—darkness brooded out into the areaway, seemed to grope blindly in at his expectant, uncurtained window. Then the lights had appeared at last, and instead of Caroline and her callers they showed a stodgy family—a little man with a bristly mustache and a full-bosomed woman who spent her evenings patting her hips and rearranging bric-à-brac. After two days of them Merlin had callously pulled down his shade.