"Glad to hear it. The chances are she'd say no, straight off the bat, if I did. Letter-writing isn't my long suit. What will you say about a proposition like me, anyhow?" "Nothing." "Nothing? Least said the better, eh?" "I mean I'm not going to write." "Not at all?" "Not till we are married. I will write home then." Paul whistled meditatively. "Mind telling why?" he queried. "Can't say that this play seems according to Hoyle, either." Jean's real reason was rooted in a fear that Mrs. Fanshaw's erratic conscience might be capable of a motherly epistle to Paul, setting forth the refuge history. So she answered that she and her family were not in sympathy, and was overjoyed to find that Paul thought her excuse valid. "I know just how you feel," he said. "My governor and I could never hit it off. But about writing your mother: we'll need her consent, you know. You're still under twenty-one." "I come of age September tenth." "But we want to be married the third week in August." "We can't," said Jean; and that was the end of it. This postponement notwithstanding, it seemed to her that she fairly tobogganed toward her marriage. Even before her return to work, Paul notified Grimes of his intention to shift for himself after October and leased the office of which he had told her. With the same energy, of which he gratefully assured her she was the dynamo, he promptly had her hunting Harlem for the little flat, just around the corner, of his imaginings. For so modest a thing, this proved singularly elusive, and it took a month of Sundays, besides unreckoned week-day explorations, before they lit finally upon what they wanted, in a building so new that the plumbers and paper-hangers still overran its upper floors. The "Lorna Doone" was an apartment house. The prospectus said so; the elevator and the hall service proved it. Mere flats have stairs and ghostly front doors which unseen hands unlock. Mere flats have also at times an old-fashioned roominess which apartments usually lack; but as Paul, out of a now ripe experience with agents and janitors, justly remarked, they have no tone. This essential attribute--the agents and janitors agreed that it was essential--seemed to him to exhale from the Lorna Doone with a certainty not evident in many higher-priced buildings whose entrances boasted far less onyx paneling and mosaic. Besides tone or, more correctly perhaps, as a constituent of tone, this edifice had location, which Jean was surprised to learn was a thing to be considered even in this happily unfashionable section.