“I will sit for you as a model, if I am good enough.”
“Good enough!” Language crumbled into meaningless vocables before her infinite perfection. “I have had a little talent. You will give me genius.”
“I will also give you your dinner.” She laughed adorably. “Do you know Connie told me I must learn to cook. I had my first lesson this morning in her kitchen—a most poetic way of doing sweetbreads. Do you like sweetbreads?”
“Now I come to think of it, I do. Enormously. I wonder why Aline never has them.”
“We'll have some—our first lunch—at home.”
“And you will cook them?” cried the enraptured man.
She nodded. “In a most becoming white apron. You'll see.”
“You'll be like a goddess taking her turn preparing the daily ambrosia for Olympus!” said Jimmie.
On another occasion they spoke of summer holidays. They would take a little cottage in the country. It would have honeysuckle over the porch, and beds of mignonette under the windows, and an old-fashioned garden full of stocks and hollyhocks and sunflowers. There would be doves and bees. They would go out early and come home with the dew on their feet. They would drink warm milk from the cow. They would go a hay-making. Norma's idea of the pastoral pathetically resembled that of the Petit Trianon.
The magic of the present with its sincerity of passionate worship on the part of the man, and its satisfaction of a soul's hunger on the part of the woman, was in itself enough to blind their eyes to the possible prose of the future. Another interest, one of the sweetest of outside interests that can bind two lovers together, helped to fix their serious thoughts to the immediate hour. Side by side with their romance grew up another, vitally interwoven with it for a spell and now springing clear into independent life. The two children Aline and Tony Merewether had found each other again, and the fresh beauty of their young loves lit the deeper passion of the older pair with the light of spring sunrise. In precious little moments of confidence Aline opened to Norma her heart's dewy happiness, and what Norma in delicate honour could divulge she told to Jimmie, who in his turn had his little tale to bear. More and more was existence like the last page of a fairy book.