Jim rose to the occasion with the same promptitude he had displayed throughout. "Leave it to Jimmy the Fixer," he cried, reassuringly. "Marriages aren't made in heaven any more--that's old stuff. They're made in Hoboken, while the cab waits. Get your things on, everybody, while I telephone." He allowed no loitering; he waved the girls away, sent the waiter scurrying with his bill, helped Robert secure hat and stick, and then dove into a telephone-booth as a woodchuck enters its hole. When he had disposed his three charges inside a taxi-cab he disappeared briefly, to return with a basket of champagne upon his arm. It is a wise general who provides himself in advance with ammunition. It was not late, as late hours are computed, but the streets were empty of traffic; hence the driver made good time, and a waiting ferry at the foot of Forty-second Street helped to shorten the journey. The wine-basket was lighter as the machine rushed up the cobbled incline to the crest of the Weehawken bluffs; Bob and Lilas were singing as it tore down the Boulevard. The smooth celerity with which this whole adventure ran its course argued a thorough preparation on James's part, but Lorelei was in no condition to analyze. On the contrary, she was tossed in the vortex of warring impulses. More than once she laid her hand upon the cab door, feeling that she could not go on with this damnable travesty. But necessity urged; she was tired, disgusted, reckless. Her former arguments continued to prove potent. Even at the journey's end there was a suspicious lack of delay. The vehicle stopped in a narrow business street, now dark and dismal; its occupants were hurried up a stairway and into a room filled with law-books, where a sleepy Justice of the Peace was nodding in a cloud of cigar smoke. There followed a noisy shuffling of chairs, some mumbled questions and answers, the crackle of papers, a deal of unintelligible rigamarole, then a man's heavy seal-ring was slipped upon Lorelei's finger, and she knew herself to be Mrs. Robert Wharton. It was all confused, unimpressive, unreal. She was never able fully to recall the picture of that room or the events that occurred there. They formed but a part of the kaleidoscopic jumble of the night's occurrences. The wedding party was in the cab once more, and it was under way. Lilas was singing maudlinly, lying back in Jim's arms with her feet projecting through a window; the groom was laughing foolishly and pawing at his bride. The street lights reeled by in drunken procession. Now that his work was done, Jim flung aside his caution and, popping the cork of a wine-bottle, drank deeply, in disregard of Lilas's attempts to share the contents. He was fiercely elated; he imbibed with the eager thirst of a dipsomaniac. It was all so like a nightmare that Lorelei began to doubt her own sanity.