"How could _I_ know what I wanted? You rushed me so, you never gave me time to think." "Oh, I say," said Ranny, "what a tiresome kiddy!" With that he kissed her, and between the kisses he asked her, with delirious rapidity: "Who gave you a drawing-room suite? Who gave you a nice house? Who let you call it Granville?" But he knew. Nobody, indeed, knew better than Ranny how tight a squeeze it was; and what a horrible misfit for Granville. Then suddenly something in the idea of Granville tickled him. "Whether is it," he inquired, "that the drawing-room suite is too large for Granville? Or that Granville is too small for the drawing-room suite?" "It's too small for anything. And I think you might have waited." "Waited?" "Yes. Why shouldn't we have gone on as we were?" He couldn't criticize her in a moment that was still so blessed; otherwise it might have struck him that Granville was certainly too small for Violet's voice. But it struck Ranny's mother as she heard it from the bedroom overhead, where she labored, spreading with her own hands the sheets for her son's marriage bed. "Why shouldn't we?" Violet's voice insisted. "Because we couldn't." He drew her to him. Her eyes closed and their faces met, flame to flame. "Poor little thing," he said. "Is its head hot? And is it tired?" "Ranny," she said, "is your mother still upstairs?" "She'll be gone in a minute," he whispered, thickly. CHAPTER XIV Violet's connection with Starker's ceased on the day of her marriage. Violet herself would have continued it; she had meant to continue it; she had fought the point passionately with Ranny; but Ranny had put his foot down with a firmness that subdued her. She had said, "Oh, well--just as you like. If you think you can get along without my pound a week." And Ranny, with considerable warmth, had answered back that he hoped to Heaven he could. And then, again and again, with infinite patience and gentleness, he explained that the privileges of acquiring Granville entailed duties and responsibilities incompatible with her attendance in Starker's Millinery Saloons. He pointed out that if they were dependent upon Granville, Granville was also dependent upon them. Granville, she could see for herself, was helpless--pathetic he was. And Violet would laugh. In those first days he could always make her laugh by playing with the personality they had created. She would come out into the roadway on an August morning, as Ranny was going off to Woolridge's, and they would look at the absurd little house where it stood winking and blinking in the sun; and morning after morning Ranny kept it up. "Look at him," he would say, "sittin' there behind his little railin's, sayin' nothing, just waitin' for you to look after him." And Violet would own that Granville was pathetic. But she triumphed. "You wouldn't feel about him that way," she said, "if he was only Number Forty-seven."