“We tossed the subject back and forth at luncheon. We figured we’d been without each other long enough. After lunch we walked up to the nearest jewelry store and got this ring. I wouldn’t let him get a big one, or anything but this one. He’s poor, you know, Joy—the Lancasters are all poor. That is, he calls it poor, but now that he’s got me he’s going to work—you know he’s supposed to be a lawyer—and that combined with his income and my little Charlette block ought to keep us passing the buck along. We got married with a special license, at the Little Church Around the Corner——” Jerry spoke with the calmness of excitement at white heat—“and before going off on our honeymoon—we thought we’d take you to our wedding dinner. You see, if it hadn’t been for you I’d have still been excitement-eating—and he’d still be cynicing it around.” The telephone rang, and Jerry darted to it. “Yes! Yes, this is Mrs. Lancaster! Yes, we’re coming, Phil!” The name was all endearments shaped in one. Jerry turned to hurry Joy with her last touches, and Joy, in a state of coma almost bordering on collapse, followed Jerry’s eager footsteps to the elevator and down into the lobby. Jerry’s husband was waiting for them, fierily handsome in evening dress, and at least ten years younger than he had seemed last night. Last night!—It seemed so far away. Joy could not even stammer much, but Jerry and Phil did not notice lack of anything, and swept her into the dining room. “Let me see,” said Phil; “it’s the first time I’ve seen my wife in evening dress.” “Second!” said Jerry swiftly. “I wore one at Hanley’s, two years ago!” “Oh, but that was a _costume_!” Their words were stupid, inconsequential, in the face of Joy sitting there. Their eyes were speaking to each other, saying so much that Joy dared not look. And just last night—— “I wonder what Mabel will say,” she ventured. They paid to her remark the tribute of polite inattention. “I owe Jerry to you,” said Jerry’s husband; “but I don’t intend to pay you.” Of course—Jerry was leaving her now! Leaving her and the apartment—alone! She considered this bleak fact, all through the course. At last, breaking in upon the conversation of eyes, she said: “What will you do with the apartment, Jerry?” “Oh, I don’t know,” said Jerry. “The lease will be up in July. Why don’t you stay in it till then? Phil and I are going to live in his apartment here, until we get a house in the suburbs, so I shan’t be moving out my stuff for some time.” To stay in the apartment—with the ghost of Sarah in curl-papers and wrapper whining through the kitchenette—and the purple kimono and pink mules gone from everywhere. . . . She did not bring the thought to the surface of the table. “You two in the suburbs!” she exclaimed instead, in faint derision. Jerry hardly smiled. People in love always lost their sense of humour, but you wouldn’t think Jerry—— “Apartment life would merely be existing for us,” said Phil. “We are going to live.”