“Carl, you’re talking so funny again. I adore you when you say things that I can’t understand. But, oh Carl, I’ve forgotten, I mustn’t say that to you any more. I mustn’t. You don’t know what’s happened.”
“No, I don’t. What is it?”
“Why, my father says that he’s convinced by now that your intentions to me aren’t serious an’ he says that he doesn’t want me to go with you any more. He says that you’re only triflin’ with my affections else you’d have asked me to marry you long ago, an’ my mother says I shouldn’t go with you ’cause you don’t seem to have any ambition to rise in the world an’ ’cause you haven’t enough money to support a wife.... Gee, if you knew the jawin’ they’ve been givin’ me for the last two nights!”
“Yes, but why has all this come so suddenly?” asked Carl.
“I don’t want to tell you, Carl.”
“You might as well, Luce. I can see part of it on your face now, because you always talk best when you’re silent. Tell me.”
“Well, you know my second cousin Fred has always been runnin’ after me, only I’ve always been cool to him because I don’t love him, of course, but a couple of nights ago he came to my father an’ said that he wanted to marry me an’ that I wouldn’t have him. An’ ever since then they’ve all been on top of me! He’s got a store on the north side, a gents’ furnishing store, an’ he makes piles of money, an’ all my family are just crazy for me to marry him. They say I’m just wastin’ my time with you an’ they’ve forbidden me to see you after tonight.”
Carl felt the incongruous embrace of amusement and compassion as he listened to her simple, broken, troubled words. This thinly yearning, stifled girl who had folded him in the arms of her puzzled adoration, was life really on the verge of wounding the diminutive misty mendicant that was her heart? He felt helpless, and a little guilty because he was not as troubled as he should have been.
“Do you want to give me up?” he asked.
“Carl, you know I don’t! You know it. But, Carl, you wouldn’t ever marry me, would you?”