LIKE days later, on the Eastern Express, they were not so confident as they had been over the St.Nicholas champagne.As confident about the remoter future, it was that annoying little stretch near at hand which gave them secret uneasiness.There had been nothing but dreaming and sentimentalizing in those four days--and that disquietingly suggested the soldier who with an impressive flourish highly resolves to give battle, then sheathes his sword and goes away to a revel.Also, like all idlers, they had spent money--far more money than total net cash resources of less than five hundred dollars warranted.
"We've spent an awful lot of money," said Susan.
She was quick to see the faint frown, the warning that she was on dangerous ground.Said he:
"Do you regret?"
"No, indeed--no!" cried she, eager to have that cloud vanish, but honest too.
She no more than he regretted a single moment of the dreaming and love-making, a single penny of the eighty and odd dollars that had enabled them fittingly to embower their romance, to twine myrtle in their hair and to provide Cupid's torch-bowls with fragrant incense.Still--with the battle not begun, there gaped that deep, wide hollow in the war chest.
Spenser's newspaper connection got them passes over one of the cheaper lines to New York--and he tried to console himself by setting this down as a saving of forty dollars against the eighty dollars of the debit item.But he couldn't altogether forget that they would have traveled on passes, anyhow.He was not regretting that he had indulged in the extravagance of a stateroom--but he couldn't deny that it was an extravagance.
However, he had only to look at her to feel that he had done altogether well in providing for her the best, and to believe that he could face with courage any fate so long as he had her at his side.
"Yes, I can face anything with you," he said."What I feel for you is the real thing.The real thing, at last."She had no disposition to inquire curiously into this.Her reply was a flash of a smile that was like a flash of glorious light upon the crest of a wave surging straight from her happy heart.
They were opposite each other at breakfast in the restaurant car.He delighted in her frank delight in the novelty of travel--swift and luxurious travel.He had never been East before, himself, but he had had experience of sleepers and diners; she had not, and every moment she was getting some new sensation.She especially enjoyed this sitting at breakfast with the express train rushing smoothly along through the mountains--the first mountains either had seen.At times they were so intensely happy that they laughed with tears in their eyes and touched hands across the table to get from physical contact the reassurances of reality.
"How good to eat everything is!" she exclaimed."You'll think me very greedy, I'm afraid.But if you'd eaten the stuff I have since we dined on the rock!"They were always going back to the rock, and neither wearied of recalling and reminding each other of the smallest details.It seemed to them that everything, even the least happening, at that sacred spot must be remembered, must be recorded indelibly in the book of their romance."I'm glad we were happy together in such circumstances," she went on."It was a test--wasn't it, Rod?""If two people don't love each other enough to be happy anywhere, they could be happy nowhere," declared he.
"So, we'll not mind being very, very careful about spending money in New York," she ventured--for she was again bringing up the subject she had been privately revolving ever since they had formed the partnership.In her wanderings with Burlingham, in her sojourn in the tenements, she had learned a great deal about the care and spending of money--had developed that instinct for forehandedness which nature has implanted in all normal women along with the maternal instinct--and as a necessary supplement to it.This instinct is more or less futile in most women because they are more or less ignorant of the realities as to wise and foolish expenditure.But it is found in the most extravagant women no less than in the most absurdly and meanly stingy.
"Of course, we must be careful," assented Rod."But I can't let you be uncomfortable.""Now, dear," she remonstrated, "you mustn't treat me that way.
I'm better fitted for hardship than you.I'd mind it less."He laughed; she looked so fine and delicate, with her transparent skin and her curves of figure, he felt that anything so nearly perfect could not but easily be spoiled.And there he showed how little he appreciated her iron strength, her almost exhaustless endurance.He fancied he was the stronger because he could have crushed her in his muscular arms.But exposures, privations, dissipations that would have done for a muscularly stronger man than he would have left no trace upon her after a few days of rest and sleep.
"It's the truth," she insisted."I could prove it, but I shan't.
I don't want to remember vividly.Rod, we _must_ live cheaply in New York until you sell a play and I have a place in some company.""Yes," he conceded."But, Susie, not too cheap.A cheap way of living makes a cheap man--gives a man a cheap outlook on life.
Besides, don't forget--if the worst comes to the worst, I can always get a job on a newspaper."She would not have let him see how uneasy this remark made her.
However, she could not permit it to pass without notice.Said she a little nervously:
