"What?"
"Be firm."
"Now just what did he mean by that?" he said to himself as he tripped down the stairs and out. He puzzled more over this advice as he hastened uptown. Why had Doris come, abruptly and without notification? The more he thought of it, the more he believed he understood the reason of Granning's warning. Doris had come to him with some new proposition, an investment for quick returns or an opening along lines of increasing salaries. The open surface-car with its cargo of coatless men and shirt-waisted women went pounding up the Avenue, hurrying him toward Doris.
He would have been at loss to define to himself his real feelings. Despite the sudden awakening in her, the delirious quality of romance had not returned to him. Memories of another face and other hours had ended that. Yet there was a solid feeling of doing the right thing, of playing square by Doris, and of a responsibility well performed. In the long, crowded, heated weeks there were long intervals when he forgot her entirely. Yet when he saw her or opened her letters, poignant with solicitude and faith, he felt his imagination kindle, if but for the moment.
He had reached the self-conscious stage in youth when he looked upon himself as supernaturally old and tried in the furnace of experience. He quieted the dormant longings in his heart by assuring himself that he now took a different view of marriage, a more significant one as a grave social step. The less he felt the romance of their relations, the more he acknowledged the solid supplementary qualities which Doris would bring him as his companion, as associate and organizer of the home.
That he could not give her all that she now poured out unreservedly to him, gave him at times a twinge of pity and compassion. She was so keen to progress, to broaden the outlook of her views, to be of real service to him. There were moments in her letters of inner revelations that stirred him almost with the guilty feeling of surprising what was not his to see. The idea of an early marriage would have been unbearable, yet as a possibility of the future it seemed to him an eminently wise and just procedure.
At the Drake mansion his ring was answered by a caretaker, who came doubtfully to let him in, pausing to search for the electric buttons. In the anteroom and down the vistas of the salons, everything was bare and draped in dust-clothes; there was a feeling of abandonment and loneliness in the bared arches, as on his first visit a year before.
"Bojo—is it you?"
He heard her voice descending somewhere from the upper flights of the great stone stairway, and answered cheerily. The caretaker disappeared, satisfied, and he waited at the foot while she came rushing down and hung herself in his arms.
"Why, Doris!" he exclaimed, surprised at her emotion and the tenseness of the figure that clung to him. "Doris, why, what's wrong?"