Part 2

“If I marry you,” cried Carter, frightened but also greatly excited, “your mother won’t give you a penny!”

“And that,” taunted Dolly, perfectly aware that she was ridiculous, “is why you won’t marry me!”

For an instant, long enough to make her blush with shame and happiness, Carter grinned at her. “Now, just for that,” he said, “I won’t kiss you, and I WILL marry you!” But, as a matter of fact, he DID kiss her. Then he gazed happily around his small sitting-room. “Make yourself at home here,” he directed, “while I pack my bag.”

“I MEAN to make myself very much at home here,” said Dolly joyfully, “for the rest of my life.”

From the recesses of the flat Carter called: “The rent’s paid only till September. After that we live in a hall bedroom and cook on a gas-stove. And that’s no idle jest, either.”

Fearing the publicity of the City Hall license bureau, they released the clergyman, much to the relief of that gentleman, and told the chauffeur to drive across the State line into Connecticut.

“It’s the last time we can borrow your mother’s car,” said Carter, “and we’d better make it go as far as we can.”

It was one of those days in May. Blue was the sky and sunshine was in the air, and in the park little girls from the tenements, in white, were playing they were queens. Dolly wanted to kidnap two of them for bridesmaids. In Harlem they stopped at a jeweler’s shop, and Carter got out and bought a wedding-ring.

In the Bronx were dogwood blossoms and leaves of tender green and beds of tulips, and along the Boston Post Road, on their right, the Sound flashed in the sunlight; and on their left, gardens, lawns, and orchards ran with the road, and the apple trees were masses of pink and white.

Whenever a car approached from the rear, Carter pretended it was Mrs. Ingram coming to prevent the elopement, and Dolly clung to him. When the car had passed, she forgot to stop clinging to him.

In Greenwich Village they procured a license, and a magistrate married them, and they were a little frightened and greatly happy and, they both discovered simultaneously, outrageously hungry. So they drove through Bedford Village to South Salem, and lunched at the Horse and Hounds Inn, on blue and white china, in the same room where Major Andre was once a prisoner. And they felt very sorry for Major Andre, and for everybody who had not been just married that morning. And after lunch they sat outside in the garden and fed lumps of sugar to a charming collie and cream to a fat gray cat.

They decided to start housekeeping in Carter’s flat, and so turned back to New York, this time following the old coach road through North Castle to White Plains, across to Tarrytown, and along the bank of the Hudson into Riverside Drive. Millions and millions of friendly folk, chiefly nurse-maids and traffic policemen, waved to them, and for some reason smiled.

“The joke of it is,” declared Carter, “they don’t know! The most wonderful event of the century has just passed into history. We are married, and nobody knows!”

But when the car drove away from in front of Carter’s door, they saw on top of it two old shoes and a sign reading: “We have just been married.” While they had been at luncheon, the chauffeur had risen to the occasion.

“After all,” said Carter soothingly, “he meant no harm. And it’s the only thing about our wedding yet that seems legal.”

Three months later two very unhappy young people faced starvation in the sitting-room of Carter’s flat. Gloom was written upon the countenance of each, and the heat and the care that comes when one desires to live, and lacks the wherewithal to fulfill that desire, had made them pallid and had drawn black lines under Dolly’s eyes.

Mrs. Ingram had played her part exactly as her dearest friends had said she would. She had sent to Carter’s flat, seven trunks filled with Dolly’s clothes, eighteen hats, and another most unpleasant letter. In this, on the sole condition that Dolly would at once leave her husband, she offered to forgive and to support her.

To this Dolly composed eleven scornful answers, but finally decided that no answer at all was the most scornful.

She and Carter then proceeded joyfully to waste his three thousand dollars with that contempt for money with which on a honey-moon it should always be regarded. When there was no more, Dolly called upon her mother’s lawyers and inquired if her father had left her anything in her own right. The lawyers regretted he had not, but having loved Dolly since she was born, offered to advance her any money she wanted. They said they felt sure her mother would “relent.”

“SHE may,” said Dolly haughtily. “I WON’T! And my husband can give me all I need. I only wanted something of my own, because I’m going to make him a surprise present of a new motor-car. The one we are using now does not suit us.”

This was quite true, as the one they were then using ran through the subway.

As summer approached, Carter had suddenly awakened to the fact that he soon would be a pauper, and cut short the honey-moon. They returned to the flat, and he set forth to look for a position. Later, while still looking for it, he spoke of it as a “job.” He first thought he would like to be an assistant editor of a magazine. But he found editors of magazines anxious to employ new and untried assistants, especially in June, were very few. On the contrary, they explained they were retrenching and cutting down expenses--they meant they had discharged all office boys who received more than three dollars a week. They further “retrenched,” by taking a mean advantage of Carter’s having called upon them in person, by handing him three or four of his stories--but by this he saved his postage-stamps.

Each day, when he returned to the flat, Dolly, who always expected each editor would hastily dust off his chair and offer it to her brilliant husband, would smile excitedly and gasp, “Well?” and Carter would throw the rejected manuscripts on the table and say: “At least, I have not returned empty-handed.” Then they would discover a magazine that neither they nor any one else knew existed, and they would hurriedly readdress the manuscripts to that periodical, and run to post them at the letter-box on the corner.

“Any one of them, if ACCEPTED,” Carter would point out, “might bring us in twenty-five dollars. A story of mine once sold for forty; so to-night we can afford to dine at a restaurant where wine is NOT ‘included.’”

Fortunately, they never lost their sense of humor. Otherwise the narrow confines of the flat, the evil smells that rose from the baked streets, the greasy food of Italian and Hungarian restaurants, and the ever-haunting need of money might have crushed their youthful spirits. But in time even they found that one, still less two, cannot exist exclusively on love and the power to see the bright side of things--especially when there is no bright side. They had come to the point where they must borrow money from their friends, and that, though there were many who would have opened their safes to them, they had agreed was the one thing they would not do, or they must starve. The alternative was equally distasteful.

Carter had struggled earnestly to find a job. But his inexperience and the season of the year were against him. No newspaper wanted a dramatic critic when the only shows in town had been running three months, and on roof gardens; nor did they want a “cub” reporter when veterans were being “laid off” by the dozens. Nor were his services desired as a private secretary, a taxicab driver, an agent to sell real estate or automobiles or stocks. As no one gave him a chance to prove his unfitness for any of these callings, the fact that he knew nothing of any of them did not greatly matter. At these rebuffs Dolly was distinctly pleased. She argued they proved he was intended to pursue his natural career as an author.

That their friends might know they were poor did not affect her, but she did not want them to think by his taking up any outside “job” that they were poor because as a literary genius he was a failure. She believed in his stories. She wanted every one else to believe in them. Meanwhile, she assisted him in so far as she could by pawning the contents of five of the seven trunks, by learning to cook on a “Kitchenette,” and to laundry her handkerchiefs and iron them on the looking-glass.

They faced each other across the breakfast-table. It was only nine o’clock, but the sun beat into the flat with the breath of a furnace, and the air was foul and humid.