"Rot: you don't need anything but shirtwaists and skirts. There won't be anybody but you, Helena, George Tankerville and myself." Matthias leaned over the back of her chair and caught her face between his hands. "It'll be a splendid holiday for us, before I start. Say yes—sweetheart!"
Joan turned up her face to his, lifting her arms to encircle his neck. She nodded consent as he bent his lips to hers.
XX
At times Joan was more than half inclined to doubt the reality of some of those unique phases of existence to which her love affair introduced her. Some experiences seemed beyond belief, even to an imagination stimulated by inordinate ambition and further excited by incessant novel-reading and theater-going.
On the Friday morning following the receipt of Helena's invitation she went shopping, squandering upwards of three weeks' savings with that delicious abandonment to extravagance which is possible only to a woman of supremely confident tomorrows. The hundreds she was in subsequent days to disburse as thoughtlessly never afforded her one-half the pleasure that accompanied the expenditure of those seventy hoarded dollars. (For aside from the rent of her room, her association with Matthias had spared her nearly every other expense of daily life.)
Among other things, she purchased for twenty-five dollars a simple evening frock eminently adapted to her requirements. A tolerably faithful copy of a foreign model, it had been designed to fetch a much higher price than that at which Joan was able to acquire it at an end-of-the-season bargain sale. She tried it on before deciding, and had the testimony of the department store mirrors that it was wonderfully becoming to her years and type of beauty. And it was the only garment of its kind that she had ever owned.
As she hurried, tardily, to keep an appointment with Matthias for lunch at Martin's, she told herself that she would never know greater happiness. She could not rid her mind of that wonderful frock and the figure she had cut in it, posing in the dressing-room.
But after luncheon—over which they lingered until they were quite alone in the eastern dining-room—with some hesitation, and having assured himself that there was not even a waiter near at hand, Matthias fumbled in one of his waistcoat pockets, produced a small leather-covered case, and passed it across the table.
"I'd meant to keep this till we got home," he said with an awkward smile. "But I don't think I can wait...."