“Wait until I sell my stories to the magazines,” said Carter, “and then I will be independent and can support you.”
The plan did not strike Dolly as one likely to lead to a hasty marriage. But he was sensitive about his stories, and she did not wish to hurt his feelings.
“Let’s get married first,” she suggested, “and then I can BUY you a magazine. We’ll call it CARTER’S MAGAZINE and we will print nothing in it but your stories. Then we can laugh at the editors!”
“Not half as loud as they will,” said Carter.
With three thousand dollars in bank and three stories accepted and seventeen still to hear from, and with Dolly daily telling him that it was evident he did not love her, Carter decided they were ready, hand in hand, to leap into the sea of matrimony. His interview on the subject with Mrs. Ingram was most painful. It lasted during the time it took her to walk out of her drawing-room to the foot of her staircase. She spoke to herself, and the only words of which Carter was sure were “preposterous” and “intolerable insolence.” Later in the morning she sent a note to his flat, forbidding him not only her daughter, but the house in which her daughter lived, and even the use of the United States mails and the New York telephone wires. She described his conduct in words that, had they come from a man, would have afforded Carter every excuse for violent exercise.
Immediately in the wake of the note arrived Dolly, in tears, and carrying a dressing-case.
“I have left mother!” she announced. “And I have her car downstairs, and a clergyman in it, unless he has run away. He doesn’t want to marry us, because he’s afraid mother will stop supporting his flower mission. You get your hat and take me where he can marry us. No mother can talk about the man I love the way mother talked about you, and think I won’t marry him the same day!”
Carter, with her mother’s handwriting still red before his eyes, and his self-love shaken with rage flourished the letter.
“And no mother,” he shouted, “can call ME a ‘fortune-hunter’ and a ‘cradle-robber’ and think I’ll make good by marrying her daughter! Not until she BEGS me to!”
Dolly swept toward him like a summer storm. Her eyes were wet and flashing. “Until WHO begs you to?” she demanded. “WHO are you marrying; mother or me?”