"It's worse for me than for you, after all. It's fun for a girl to get married. But I've all the ordeals to go through, facing the Registrar, buying the ring—"
"Well, I'll do it," she said resignedly, "if you're frightened."
But as they passed the first jeweller's shop he dived in suddenly without speaking to her. After a few minutes he emerged, his face flushed and damp, his hand shaky.
"Look here, come up a side way somewhere, old thing! They've given me a chunk of cardboard with little holes in it. You've got to poke your finger in till you see which fits. Lord, I'm glad you don't get married more than once in a lifetime."
"Don't you like it, Louis?" she asked, as she fitted her finger into the little holes and found that she took the smallest size ring. "I do. I think it's frightfully exciting."
"I know you do. Women love getting married. They're cock of the walk on their wedding days, if they never are again. On her wedding day a woman is triumphant! She's making a public exhibition of the fact that she has achieved the aim of her life—she's landed a man!"
"Louis!" she cried indignantly, and next minute decided to think that he was joking as they reached the jeweller's shop again. She had been looking at the jewellery in the window: it was her first peep at a jeweller's shop, and she thought how expensive everything was. She noticed the price of wedding rings. When Louis came out with the ring in a little box which he put into his pocket, he told her casually that it cost something three times more than the prices in the window.
As they walked up the street he told her that he was tired to death, that he had not been to bed since the Oriana left Melbourne.
"I thought you stayed at an hotel that night," she said.
"No, as a matter of fact, my pet, we got run in, all of us. I don't know, now, what we did when we found the boat had gone without us, but we made up our minds to paint the town red. So we got landed in the police's hands for the night and locked up."