At the studio it was much easier.
"Some time in the early fall," Anne told her callers, who arrived by two's, three's and four's, as the news began to circulate among her friends.
"No, I won't keep this," with a jerk of her thumb towards the big, bare room which had been hers since she left Aunt Milly and the little home town. "There's a room at the top of the Kensington I can have, with a light as good as this, and that settles the last problem. I'd hate to have to go outdoors for meals, when I'm working."
"Nan Gilbert!" exclaimed her dearest friend. "You have the best luck! You can do good work, and get good pay for it, and be happy all by yourself; and now you're going to be happier, with a husband who'll let you live your own life; you'll be absolutely free, not even a percolator to bother with, nothing to take your mind from your own creative work, free to express your own personality!"
"Mercy," said Anne, closing the door upon this last caller. "If I don't set the North River, at least, on fire, pretty soon, they'll all call me a slacker."
She hung her card, "Engaged," upon the door leading into the hall (some one had scrawled "Best Wishes" underneath the printed word), and proceeded to get her dinner in a thoughtful frame of mind. The tiny kitchenette boasted ice-box, fireless, and a modest collection of electric cooking appliances; in a half-hour Anne had evolved a cream soup, a bit of steak, nearly cubical in proportions, slice of graham bread, a salad of lettuce and tomato with skilfully tossed dressing, a muffin split ready to toast, with the jam and spreader for it, and coffee was dripping into the very latest model of coffee-pots. Anne had never neglected her country appetite, and was a living refutation of the idea that neatness and art may not dwell together. She moved quietly and with a speed which had nothing of haste; her mind was busy with a magazine cover for December, she believed she'd begin studying camels.
After dinner came Burt Winchester, a steady-voiced, olive-skinned young man, in pleasant contrast to Anne's vivacious fairness, and together they journeyed uptown and then west to the Kensington, for a final decision upon the one vacant apartment. The rooms were of fair size, they were all light, and the agent had at least half a yard of applicants upon a printed slip in his pocket.
Burt studied the apartment not at all, but his fiancée with quiet amusement. He was much in love with Anne, but he understood her better than she had yet discovered.
"I don't think we'll ever find anything better," she was saying to him. "Perhaps he'd have it redecorated for us, with a long lease—"
The agent coughed discreetly. "The leases are for one year, with privilege of renewal," he said to Burt. "It has just been redecorated; is there anything needed?"