"I do believe he's jealous!" She laughed coaxingly, slipping a hand through the crook of his unyielding arm. "Are you jealous? Just as jealous as you can be? Jealous of my typewriter?" She bent upon him a horrific frown. "Answer to me, sir! Do you love that electric plant? How dare you look at dynamos!"
He surrendered, laughing with her.
"You little idiot! Just the same—oh, well, what's the use? Just so you're happy."
It was the first time there had been a sense of reservations behind their kiss. But he seemed not to know it, radiating content.
"All right, run along and play in San Francisco. I don't care. I do care. I do care like the devil. But it won't be long. Only I warn you, I'm not going to be called Mr. Helen Davies!"
She laughed too, rising and tucking up her hair.
"As if I wanted you to be! I'll never be so well-known as that, don't fear! Now if I were a real writer—" The trace of wistfulness in her voice was quickly repressed. "Then, young man, you'd have reason to worry! But I'm not. I wonder if that expressman's never coming!"
"You oughtn't to be trying to manage all this yourself," he said. "I wish I'd known in time. I could have come up and done it for you."
She was touched by his whole-hearted acceptance of her plans, and she felt a twinge of regret, a longing to acquiesce in his. But some strong force within herself would not yield. She could not be dependent upon him, not yet. Later—later she would feel differently.
There were six months between her and final legal freedom. The miserable half hour that had given her an interlocutory decree of divorce had been buried by the rush of new events; routine completion of the court's action had no vital meaning for her. She had in reality been long divorced from the past she wished to forget. The date six months in the future meant only the point at which she would face the details of a new life. Until that time she need not consider them too closely. It was enough to know that she and Paul loved each other. All difficulties when she reached them would be conquered by that love.