Marjorie considered. Ordinarily at this hour she would be walking into the office. She would be speaking with what politeness one can muster up in the morning to Miss Kaplan, who was quite as exuberant at five as at seven in the evening; she would be hoping desperately that she wasn't late, and that if she was she would escape Mr. Wildhack, who glared terrifyingly at such young women who didn't get down on schedule time. Marjorie was not much on schedule time, but she always felt that the occasions when she got there too late really ought to be balanced by those when she came too early. Instead of all this, she was racing north with the fresh wind blowing against her face, with no duties and no responsibilities, and something that, but for the person who shared it with her, promised to be rather fun. Just then something came to her. She had an engagement for tea with Bradley Logan.
Suddenly that engagement seemed exceedingly important, and something that she should on no account have missed. But at least she could write to him and explain.
"Have you a fountain-pen?" she inquired of Francis, "and can I write sitting here?"
"If you don't mind writing on a leaf from my notebook. It's all I have."
She was privately a little doubtful as to the impression that such a note would make on Mr. Logan, for she remembered one wild tale she had heard from him about a man who spent his whole life in a secluded room somewhere in France, experimenting on himself as to what sort of perfumes and colors and gestures made him happiest. None of them had made him happy at all, to the best of her remembrance; but the idea Mr. Logan left her with was that he was that sort of person himself, and that the wrong kind of letter-paper could make him suffer acutely. She was amused at it, really, but a bit impressed, too. One doesn't want to be thought the kind of person who does the wrong thing because of knowing no better. Still, it was that or nothing.
"Dear Mr. Logan," she began, more illegibly than she knew because of the car's motion, "I am so sorry that I have not been able to tell you in advance that I couldn't take tea with you. But Mr. Ellison has taken me away rather suddenly. He had to go to Canada to take a position. We hope we will see you when we get back."
She did not know till much later that owing to the thank-you-ma'am which they reached simultaneously with the word "suddenly" that when Mr. Logan got that note he thought it was "severely," and that the bad penmanship and generally disgraceful appearance of the loose-leaf sheet, the jerky hand, and the rather elderly envelope which was all Francis could find—it had been living in a pocket with many other things for some time—gave him a wrong idea. Mr. Logan, to anticipate a little, by this erroneous means, acquired an idea very near the truth. He thought that Marjorie Ellison was being kidnapped against her will, and made it the subject of much meditation. His nervous ailment prevented him from dashing after her.
Marjorie fortunately knew nothing of all this, for she was proud to the core, and she would rather have died than let any one but Lucille, of necessity in on it, know anything but that she was spending the most delightful and willing of honeymoons.
So when they found a little up-state town with a tavern of exceeding age and stiffness, and alighted in search of luncheon, the landlord and landlady thought just what Marjorie wanted them to think; that all was well and very recent.
She sank into one of the enormous walnut chairs, covered with immaculate and flaring tidies which reminded her of Cousin Anna and stuck into the back of her neck, and viewed the prospect with pleasure. For the moment she almost forgot Francis, and the problem of managing just the proper distance from him. There was a stuffed fish, glassy-eyed and with cotton showing from parts of him, over the counter. There were bills of forgotten railroads framed and hung in different places. There was a crayon portrait of a graduated row of children from the seventies hung over the fireplace, four of them, on the order of another picture, framed and hanging in another part of the room, and called "A Yard of Kittens." Marjorie wondered with pleasure why they hadn't added enough children to bring it up to a yard, and balanced things properly. The fireplace itself was bricked up, all except a small place where a Franklin stove sat, with immortelles sticking out of its top as if they aimed at being fuel. Marjorie had seen immortelles in fireplaces before, but in a Franklin they were new to her. She made up her mind to find out about it before she was through.