Now, whatever misgivings and afterthoughts the Lady Alene Innesly may have had, she was nevertheless certain that to resist Smith was to fight against the stars in their courses. For not only was she in the toils of an American, but more hopeless still, an American who chronicled the most daring and headlong idiosyncrasies of the sort of young men of whom he was very certainly an irresistible example.
To her there was something Shakespearean about the relentless sequence of events since the moment when she had first succumbed to the small, oblong pink package, and her first American novel.[108]
And, thinking Shakespeareanly as she stood in the purple evening light, with his arm clasping her waist, she looked up at him from her charming abstraction:
"'If 'twere done,'" she murmured, "'when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly.'" And then, gazing deep into his eyes, a noble idiom of her adopted country fell from her lips:
"Dearest," she said, "my father won't do a thing to you."
And so she ran away with him to Miami where the authorities, civil and religious, are accustomed to quick action.
It was only fifty miles by train, and preliminary telephoning did the rest.
The big chartered launch that left for Verbena Inlet next morning poked its nose out of the rainbow mist into the full glory of the rising sun. Her golden head lay on his shoulder.
Sideways, with delicious indolence, she glanced at a small boat which they were passing close aboard. A fat gentleman, a fat lady, and a boatman occupied the boat. The fat gentleman was fast to a tarpon.
Up out of the dazzling Atlantic shot three hundred pounds of quivering silver. Splash!