"Thank you! That is another excuse."
"And it certainly looks very well," Jack declared.
"Do you think so?" Mary flushed slightly. She could not help being pleased. "After six years, could I drop back into the old chrysalis naturally, without awkwardness? Did I still know how to wear a fine gown?"—and the gift for it, as anyone could see, was born in her as surely as certain gifts were born in Jack. "But," she added, severely, "I have only two—just two! And the cost of them! It will take the whole orange crop!"
Just two, when she ought to have twenty! When he would have liked to put all the Paris models in the store in a wagon and, himself driving, deliver them at her door!
"Having succumbed to temptation, I enjoy it out of sheer respect to the orange crop," Mary said; "and yes, because I like beautiful gowns; wickedly, truly like them! And I like the Avenue, just as I like the desert."
And all that she liked he could give her! And all that he could give she had stubbornly refused!
The liveliness of her expression, the many shades of meaning that she could set capering with a glance, were now as the personal reflection of the day and the scene. Their gait was a sauntering one. They went as far as the Park and started back, as if all the time of the desert were theirs. They stopped to look into the windows of shops of every kind, from antiques to millinery. When he saw a hat which he declared, after deliberate, critical appraisement, would surely become her, she asked boldly if it were better than the one she wore.
"I mean an extra hat; that one more hat would have the good fortune of becoming you!"
"Almost a real contribution to the literature of compliments!" she answered, unruffled.
He thought, too, that she ought to have a certain necklace in a jeweler's window.