“How pretty and cozy it might be made, how dear!” she exclaimed. “And one would be so high up on the eleventh floor, that one would feel like a bird in a nest.”
His face lighted. He seemed to like the idea tremendously.
“Why, that’s so,” he laughed. “That idea suits me down to the ground. A bird in a nest. But there’d have to be two. One would be lonely. Say, Miss Alicia, how would you like to live in a place like that?”
“I am sure any one would like it—if they had some dear relative with them.” He loved her “dear relative,” loved it. He knew how much it meant of what had lain hidden unacknowledged, even unknown to her, through a lifetime in her early-Victorian spinster breast.
“Let’s go to New York and rent one and live in it together. Would you come?” he said, and though he laughed, he was not jocular in the usual way. “Would you, if we waked up and found this Temple Barholm thing was a dream?”
Something in his manner, she did not know what, puzzled her a little.
“But if it were a dream, you would be quite poor again,” she said, smiling.
“No, I wouldn’t. I’d get Galton to give me back the page. He’d do it quick—quick,” he said, still with a laugh. “Being poor’s nothing, anyhow. We’d have the time of our lives. We’d be two birds in a nest. You can look out those eleventh-story windows ’way over to the Bronx, and get bits of the river. And perhaps after a while Ann would do—like she said, and we’d be three birds.”
“Oh!” she sighed ecstatically. “How beautiful it would be! We should be a little family!”
“So we should,” he exulted. “Think of T. T. with a family!” He drew his paper of calculations toward him again. “Let’s make believe we’re going to do it, and work out what it would cost—for three. You know about housekeeping, don’t you? Let’s write down a list.”