As soon as he saw a taxi, Martin hailed it and told the chauffeur to drive to the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue."We'll walk from there," he said to Joan, "--if you'd like to, that is.""I would like to.I want to peer into the shop windows and look at hats and dresses.I've got absolutely nothing to wear.Marty, tell me, are we well off?"Martin laughed.She reminded him of a youngster going for a picnic and pooling pocket money."Yes," he said, "--quite."She sat back with her hands crossed in her lap."I'm so glad.It simplifies everything to have plenty to spend." But for her exquisite slightness and freshness, no one would have imagined that she was an only just-fledged bird, flying for the first time.Her equability and poise were those of a completely sophisticated woman.
Nothing seemed to surprise her.Whatever happened was all part and parcel of the great adventure.Yesterday she was an overwatched girl, looking yearningly at a city that appeared to be unattainable.
To-day she was a married woman who, a moment ago, had been standing before a minister, binding herself for good or ill to a man who was delightfully a boy and of whom she knew next to nothing.What did it matter--what did anything matter--so long as she achieved her long-dreamed-of ambition to live and see life?
"Then I can go ahead," she added, "and dress as becomes the wife of a man of one of our best families.I've never been able to dress before.Trust me to make an excellent beginning." There was a twinkle of humor in her eyes as she said these things, and excitement too."Tell me this, Marty: is it as easy to get unmarried as it is to get married?""You're not thinking about that already, surely!""Oh, no.But information is always useful, isn't it?"Just for a moment the boy's heart went down into his boots.She didn't love him yet; he knew that He intended to earn her love as an honest man earns his living.What hurt was the note of flippancy in her voice in talking of an event that was to him so momentous and wonderful.It seemed to mean no more to her to have entered into a lifelong tie than the buying of a mere hat--not so much, not nearly so much, as to have found a way of not going back to those two old people in the country.She was young, awfully young, he told himself again.Presently her feet would touch the earth, and she would understand.
As they walked up Fifth Avenue and with little gurgles of enthusiasm Joan halted at every other shop to look at hats that appealed to Martin as absurdly, willfully freakish, and evening dresses which seemed deliberately to have been handed over to a cat to be torn to ribbons, it came back to him that one just such soft spring evening, the year before, he had walked home from the Grand Central Station and been seized suddenly with an almost painful longing to be asked by some precious person who belonged wholly to him to share her delight in all the things which then stood for nothing in his life.
Then and there he fulfilled an ambition long cherished and hidden away; he touched Joan on the arm and opened the elaborate door of a famous jeweler.He was known to the shop from the fact that he and his father had always dealt there for wedding and Christmas presents.He was welcomed by a man in the clothes of a concert singer and with the bedside manner of a family doctor.
He was desperately self-conscious, and his collar felt two sizes too small, but he managed to get into his voice a tone that was sufficiently matter-of-fact to blunt the edge of the man's rather roguish smile."Let me see your latest gold-mesh bags," he said as ordinary, everyday people ask to see collar studs.
"Marty!" whispered Joan."What are you going to do?""Oh, that's all right," said Martin."You can't get along without a bag, you see."Half a dozen yellow, insinuating things were laid out on the shining glass, and with a wonderful smile that was worth all the gold the earth contained to Martin, Joan made a choice--but not hastily, and not before she had inspected every other gold bag in the shop.Even at eighteen she was woman enough to want to be quite certain that she possessed herself of the very best thing of its kind and would never have, in future, to feel jealous of one that might lie alluringly in the window.
"This one," she said finally."I'm quite sure."Martin didn't ask the price.It was for his bride.He picked it up and hung it over her wrist, said "The old address," nodded to the man,--who was just about to call attention to a tray of diamond brooches,--and led the way out, feeling at least six feet two.
And as Joan regained the street, she passed another milestone in her life.To be the proprietor of precisely just such a gold bag had been one of her steady dreams.
"Marty," she said, "what a darling you are!"The boy's eyes filled with tears.