"I'd never take my turn if I could help it—particularly just after being away; you know that."
She turned carelessly to the clerk. "I'll take that too,"—she indicated the trinket which she had examined last. "Send it, please. I've finished here now, Henry."
"I thought you didn't like that sort of thing." His glance had gone to the bit of frippery in the clerk's hand.
"I don't," she confessed.
"Then don't buy it. She doesn't want that; don't send it," he directed the salesman.
"Very well, sir."
Henry touched her arm and turned her away. She flushed a little, but she was not displeased. Any of the other men whom she knew would have wasted twenty dollars, as lightly as herself, rather than confess, "I really didn't want anything more; I just didn't want to be seen waiting." They would not have admitted—those other men—that such a sum made the slightest difference to her or, by inference, to them; but Henry was always willing to admit that there had been a time when money meant much to him, and he gained respect thereby.
The tea room of such a department store as Field's offers to young people opportunities for dining together without furnishing reason for even innocently connecting their names too intimately, if a girl is not seen there with the same man too often. There is something essentially casual and unpremeditated about it—as though the man and the girl, both shopping and both hungry, had just happened to meet and go to lunch together. As Constance recently had drawn closer to Henry Spearman in her thought, and particularly since she had been seriously considering marrying him, she had clung deliberately to this unplanned appearance about their meetings. She found something thrilling in this casualness too. Spearman's bigness, which attracted eyes to him always in a crowd, was merely the first and most obvious of the things which kept attention on him; there were few women who, having caught sight of the big, handsome, decisive, carefully groomed man, could look away at once. If Constance suspected that, ten years before, it might have been the eyes of shop-girls that followed Spearman with the greatest interest, she was certain no one could find anything flashy about him now. What he compelled now was admiration and respect alike for his good looks and his appearance of personal achievement—a tribute very different from the tolerance granted those boys brought up as irresponsible inheritors of privilege like herself.
As they reached the restaurant and passed between the rows of tables, women looked up at him; oblivious, apparently, to their gaze, he chose a table a little removed from the others, where servants hurried to take his order, recognizing one whose time was of importance. She glanced across at him, when she had settled herself, and the first little trivialities of their being together were over.
"I took a visitor down to your office this morning," she said.