“By all means. I’ve some pretty good sketches of Macclesfield I’d like to show you.”
“That will be charming,” said my caller and, with a smile and bow that included us all, he was gone.
I did not get that kiss after all, and I may as well confess I was disappointed.
XI
THE winter was passing into spring and Reggie had been a regular visitor at our house every night. The family had become used, or as Ada put it “resigned,” to him. Though she regarded him with suspicion and thought papa ought to ask his “intentions,” she knew that I was deeply in love with him. She had wrung this admission from me and she expressed herself as being sorry for me.
Because of Reggie’s dislike for everything connected with the stage, I had stopped my elocution lessons and I was making some money at my painting. We had had a fine carnival that winter, and I did a lot of work for an art store, painting snow scenes and sports on diminutive toboggans, as souvenirs of Canada. These American visitors bought and I had, for a time, all the work I could do. This work and, of course, Reggie’s strenuous objections kept my mind from my former infatuation.
Then, one night, he took me to see Julia Marlowe in “Romeo and Juliet.” All my old passion and desire to act swept over me, and I nearly wept to think of having to give it up. When we were going home, I told Reggie how I felt, and this is what he said:
“Marion, which would you prefer to be, an actress or my wife?”
We had come to a standstill in the street. Everything was quiet and still, and the balmy sweetness of the Spring night seemed to enwrap even this ugly quarter of the city in a certain charm and beauty. I felt a sweet thrilling sense of deep tenderness and yearning toward Reggie, and also a feeling of gratitude and humility. It seemed to me that he was stooping down from a very great height to poor, insignificant me. More than ever he seemed a wonderful and beautiful hero in my young eyes.
“Well, dear?” he prompted, and I answered with a soft question: