"Will you resign down there to-day? Will you marry me this afternoon?" A brief silence, then--"Yes." Thus it came about that they met at the City Hall license bureau, got their license, and half an hour later were married at the house of a minister in East Thirty-third Street, within a block of the Subway station. He was feverish, gay, looked years younger than his thirty-seven. She was quiet, dim, passive, neither grave nor gay, but going through her part without hesitation, with much the same patient, plodding expression she habitually bore as she sat working at her machine--as if she did not quite understand, but was doing her best and hoped to get through not so badly. "I've had nothing to eat," said he as they came out of the parsonage. "Nor I," said she. "We'll go to Delmonico's," said he, and hailed a passing taxi. On the way, he sitting in one corner explained to her, shrunk into the other corner: "I can confess now that I married you under false pretenses. I am not prosperous, as I used to be. To be brief and plain, I'm down and out, professionally." She did not move. Apparently she did not change expression. Yet he, speaking half banteringly, felt some frightful catastrophe within her. "You are--poor?" she said in her usual quiet way. "_We_ are poor," corrected he. "I have at present only a thousand dollars a month--a little more, but not enough to talk about." She did not move or change expression. Yet he felt that her heart, her blood were going on again. "Are you--angry?" he asked. "A thousand dollars a month seems an awful lot of money to me," she said. "It's nothing--nothing to what we'll soon have. Trust me." And back into his eyes flashed their former look. "I've been sick. I'm well again. I shall get what I want. If you want anything, you've only to ask for it. I'll get it. I know how. . . . I don't prey, myself--I've no fancy for the brutal sports. But I teach lions how to prey, and I make them pay for the lessons." He laughed with an effervescing of young vitality and self-confidence that made him look handsome and powerful. "In the future they'll have to pay still higher prices." She was looking at him with weary, wondering, pathetic eyes that gazed from the pallor of her dead-white face mysteriously. "What are you thinking?" he asked. "I was listening," replied she. "Doesn't it make you happy--what you are going to have?" "No," replied she. "But it makes me content." With eyes suddenly suffused, he took her hand--so gently. "Dorothy," he said, "you will try to love me?" "I'll try," said she. "You'll be kind to me?" "I couldn't be anything else," he cried. And in a gust of passion he caught her to his breast and kissed her triumphantly. "I love you--and you're mine--mine!" She released herself with the faint insistent push that seemed weak, but always accomplished its purpose. Her lip was trembling. "You said you'd be kind," she murmured.