CHAPTER XXXII
THE EMPTY BERTH
The one thing Mallory was beginning to learn about Marjorie was that she would never take the point of view he expected, and never proceed along the lines of his logic.
She had grown furious at him for what he could not help. She had told him that she would marry him out of spite. She had commanded him to pursue and apprehend the flying parson. He failed and returned crestfallen and wondering what new form her rage would take.
And, lo and behold, when she saw him so downcast and helpless, she rushed to him with caresses, cuddled his broad shoulders against her breast, and smothered him. It was the sincerity of his dejection and the complete helplessness he displayed that won her woman's heart.
Mallory gazed at her with almost more wonderment than delight. This was another flashlight on her character. Most courtships are conducted under a rose-light in which wooer and wooed wear their best clothes or their best behavior; or in a starlit, moonlit, or gaslit twilight where romance softens angles and wraps everything in velvet shadow. Then the two get married and begin to live together in the cold, gray daylight of realism, with undignified necessities and harrowing situations at every step, and disillusion begins its deadly work.
This young couple was undergoing all the inconveniences and temper-exposures of marriage without its blessed compensations. They promised to be well acquainted before they were wed. If they still wanted each other after this ordeal, they were pretty well assured that their marriage would not be a failure.
Mallory rejoiced to see that the hurricane of Marjorie's jealousy had only whipped up the surface of her soul. The great depths were still calm and unmoved, and her love for him was in and of the depths.
Soon after leaving Ogden, the train entered upon the great bridge across the Great Salt Lake. The other passengers were staring at the enormous engineering masterpiece and the conductor was pointing out that, in order to save forty miles and the crossing of two mountain chains, the railroad had devoted four years of labor and millions of dollars to stretching a thirty-mile bridge across this inland ocean.
But Marjorie and Mallory never noticed it. They were absorbed in exploring each other's souls, and they had safely bridged the Great Salt Lake which the first big bitter jealousy spreads across every matrimonial route.