Something in his manner, she did not know what, puzzled her a little.
“But if it were a dream, you would be quite poor again,” she said, smiling.
“No, I wouldn't. I'd get Galton to give me back the page. He'd do it quick—quick,” he said, still with a laugh. “Being poor's nothing, anyhow. We'd have the time of our lives. We'd be two birds in a nest. You can look out those eleventh-story windows 'way over to the Bronx, and get bits of the river. And perhaps after a while Ann would do like she said, and we'd be three birds.”
“Oh!” she sighed ecstatically. “How beautiful it would be! We should be a little family!”
“So we should,” he exulted. “Think of T. T. with a family!” He drew his paper of calculations toward him again. “Let's make believe we're going to do it, and work out what it would cost—for three. You know about housekeeping, don't you? Let's write down a list.”
If he had warmed to his work before, he warmed still more after this. Miss Alicia was drawn into it again, and followed his fanciful plans with a new fervor. They were like two children who had played at make-believe until they had lost sight of commonplace realities.
Miss Alicia had lived among small economies and could be of great assistance to him. They made lists and added up lines of figures until the fine, huge room and its thousands of volumes melted away. In the great hall, guarded by warriors in armor, the powdered heads of the waiting footmen drooped and nodded while the prices of pounds of butter and sugar and the value of potatoes and flour and nutmegs were balanced with a hectic joy, and the relative significance of dollars and cents and shillings and half-crowns and five-cent pieces caused Miss Alicia a mild delirium.
By the time that she had established the facts that a shilling was something like twenty-five cents, a dollar was four and twopence, and twenty-five dollars was something over five pounds, it was past midnight.
They heard the clock strike the half-hour, and stopped to stare at each other.
Tembarom got up with yet another laugh.