They are close together, he and she now. Their lips meet—and meet—with a sweet touch—with a long pressure—children being good to each other—cloud mingling with gleaming cloud.
“Ollie dear.” Nancy's voice comes from somewhere as far away and still as if she were talking out of a star. “Stop kissing me. I can't think when you kiss me, I can only feel you be close. If you want to hear about that news, that is,” she adds, her lips hardly moving.
All that Oliver wants to do is to hold her and be quiet—to make out of the stuffy room, the nervous rushing of noise under the window, the air exhausted with heat, a place in some measure peaceful, in some measure retired, where they can lie under lucent peace for a moment as shells lie in clear water and not be worried about anything any more. But again, the time they are to have is too short—Oliver really must be back Monday afternoon—already he is unpleasantly conscious of the time-table part of his mind talking trains at him. He takes his arms from around Nancy—she sits up rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand as if to take the dream that was so glittering in them away now she and Oliver have to talk business-affairs.
“Oh, my hair—lucky it's bobbed, that's all—I'd have lost all the hairpins I ever had in it by now—Well, Ollie—”
Her hand goes over to his uneasily, takes hold. For a moment the dream comes back and she forgets entirely what she was going to say.
“Oh dear!”
“Nancy, Nancy, Nancy!”
But she will be firm about their talking. “No, we mustn't really, we mustn't, or I can't tell you anything at all. Well, it's this.
“I didn't tell you about it at all—didn't even imagine it would come to anything. But that old geology specimen Mrs. Winters knows the art-editor of “The Bazaar” and she happened to say so once when she was here being gloomy with mother, so I wormed a letter out of her to her friend about me. And I sent some things in and the poor man seemed to be interested—at least he said he wanted to see more—and then we started having a real correspondence. Until finally—it was that Friday because I wrote you the letter right away—he goes and sends me a letter saying to come on to New York—that I can have a regular job with them if I want to, and if they like my stuff well enough, after a couple of months they'll send me to Paris to do fashions over there and pay me a salary I can more than live on and everything!”
Nancy cannot help ending with a good deal of triumph, though there is anxiety behind the triumph as well. But to Oliver it seems as if the floor had come apart under his feet.