"An' he tol' the truth," she said, stopping still with her hands on her hips like she was fixing for a long sermon. "An' furthermore, if she's rich she don't need to have neither. But marryin' for riches is like puttin' up preserves—it looks to be a heap bigger pile beforehan' than afterwards. An' many a man marries a rich girl expectin' a automobile when he don't git nothin' but a baby buggy!"
Mr. Gayle has been coming over so early every morning since that first morning that he met Miss Claxton, and staying so late that I haven't had much time to write. I've been too busy watching. I've often heard Doctor Gordon say that diseases have a "period of incubation," but I believe that love is one disease that doesn't incubate. It just comes, like light does when you switch on the electricity. This morning Mr. Gayle came so early that Rufe went into the sitting-room and began to poke fun at him, as usual.
"Hello, old man," he said, shaking hands with him. "I'm surely glad to see that it's you. Thought of course when the door-bell rang so soon after breakfast that it was an enlarged picture agent!"
"No, I'm far from being an enlarged anything," the poor man said, wiping off the perspiration from his forehead, for he must have walked very fast. "In fact, I'm feeling rather 'ensmalled,' as our friend, Ann, might say. I have never before so realized my utter unworthiness!"
"Bosh," Rufe said, slapping him on the shoulder in a friendly way. "Why, man, you're on to your job as well as anybody I ever saw. Why, your last article in The Journal for the Cognoscenti made me give up every idea of the old-fashioned Heaven I'd hoped for—a place where a gas bill is never presented, and alarm clocks and society editors enter not!"
"Mr. Clayborne would have been worth his weight in platinum as court jester to some melancholy monarch in the middle ages," Miss Claxton said, looking up from her crochet work which mother is teaching her and Cousin Eunice to do, because it has come back into style, to smile at Mr. Gayle.
"I'm not what Ann calls 'smart'!" he said in answer to her, "but I remember enough history to know that the other name for jester is fool. I shan't stay where people call me such names!" So he got up and went out, which gave Cousin Eunice and Waterloo and me an excuse to go too. So we left the lovers alone.
"Well, he's what I call a damn fool," Rufe said in a whisper as soon as the door was closed so they couldn't hear. "Coming over here every few minutes in the day, 'totin' a long face,' as mammy says, and hasn't got the nerve to say boo to a goose!"
"Saying boo to a goose wouldn't help his suit any," Cousin Eunice said; "besides, well-regulated young people don't get engaged in three days!"
"What ill-regulated young people you and I must have been!" Rufe said, then dodged Waterloo's ball which she threw at him, saying what a story! It was nearly two weeks before they got engaged.