“Would n't it get on yours?”
Norma shook her head. “I have n't any nerves for things to get on. People don't have nerves when they're happy.”
“And are you happy, really, really happy?”
“I am deliciously happy,” said Norma.
She went to bed laughing at the discomfiture of Weever and the remoteness of him and of the days last summer when she first met him among the Monzies' disreputable crowd. He belonged to a former state of existence. Jimmie's portrait, which had been put for two or three reasons in her bedroom, caught her attention. She looked at it with a dreamy smile for a long time, and then turned to the glass. Made curiously happy by what she saw there, she kissed her fingers to the portrait.
“He is the better prophet,” she said.
But Connie's advice as to the desirability of a speedy marriage remained in her mind. Jimmie with characteristic diffidence had not yet suggested definite arrangements. She was gifted with so much insight as to apprehend the reasons for his lack of initiative. His very worship of her, his overwhelming sense of goddess-conferred boon in her every smile and condescension, precluded the asking of favours. So far it was she who had arranged their daily life. It was she who had established the custom of the studio visits, and she had taken off her hat and had inaugurated the comedy of the domestic felicities of her own accord. She treasured this worship in her heart as a priceless thing, all the more exquisite because it lay by the side of the knowledge of her own unworthiness. The sacrifice of maidenly modesty in proposing instead of coyly yielding was at once a delicious penance for hypocritical assumption of superiority, and a salve to her pride as a beautiful and desirable woman. It was with a glorious sureness of relation, therefore, that she asked him the next day if he had thought of a date for their marriage.
“There is no reason for a long engagement that I can see,” she added, with a blush which she felt, and was tremulously happy at feeling.
“I was waiting for you to say, dear,” he replied, his arm around her. “I dared not ask.”
She laughed the deep laugh of a woman's happiness.