For the first time, I got no regular answer. Of course, by now I always had a kind of a sense or feeling of what was going on. This time there was a feeling of a celebration, rejoicing, everybody on a holiday. Which was exactly the way I felt as I looked at the girl. No objections? Then why ask questions?
"Julia," old Henry Schnable was saying, "this is Mr. John Barth. John, this is—John! John, remember——"
I had reached out and taken the girl's hand. I tucked her arm in mine and she looked up at me with the light, the fire in the green depths swimming toward the surface. I didn't know what she saw in me—neither of us knew then—but the light was there, glowing. We walked together out of Henry Schnable's office.
"John! Julia, your papers! You have to sign——"
Business? We had business elsewhere, she and I.
"Where?" I asked her in the elevator. It was the first word either of us had spoken.
"My apartment," she said in a voice like a husky torch song. "It's close. The girl who rooms with me is spending the week back home with her folks. The show she was in closed. We can be alone."
We could. Five minutes in a cab and we were.
I never experienced anything remotely like it in all my life. I never will again.