“Are you,” she asked, “proposing to me?”
He nodded.
She looked thoughtfully down into the water, then raised her eyes to face him frankly.
“As your wife,” she asked, “would I continue to be your secretary?”
“Hardly. I couldn’t give you orders. It wouldn’t set well with the clients. But you wouldn’t need to work. You could have a car of your own and—”
“That’s what I thought,” she interrupted. “We’re getting along swell the way it is. You’d establish me in a home somewhere as your wife. Then you’d get a secretary to help you with your work. The first thing you knew, you’d be sharing excitement and experiences with the secretary and I’d be entirely out of your life. No, Mr. Perry Mason, you aren’t the marrying kind. You live at too high speed. You’re too wrapped up in mysteries. I’d rather share in your life than in your bank roll.”
“But think of all that baggage,” he told her, sliding his arms around her waist. “It has those perfectly good initials, ‘D.M.,’ which we can’t let go to waste.”
She snuggled close to him. “No,” she said, “I think my hunch is right, Chief. I think it would be better for me to remain Della Street and have the baggage wrong than to become Della Mason and have everything else wrong. But — well, I’ll tell you what I’ll do — ask me again in Singapore.”
“It’s a long ways between here and Singapore,” he told her. “How about Waikiki?”
She laughed, flung back her head to catch the wind on her cheeks and forehead. “Always impatient,” she said. “Come on. Let’s walk the deck. I don’t think you need a wife. But I know damn well you need a secretary who’s willing to go to jail occasionally to back your play.”