Una and Walter talked it over, but they seemed mutely to agree, after the evening of Mrs. Golden and conversation, that it was merely balking for him to call at the flat. Nor did Una and Mrs. Golden discuss why Mr. Babson did not come again, or whether Una was seeing him. Una was accustomed to say only that she would be "away this evening," but over the teapot she quoted Walter's opinions on Omar, agnosticism, motor magazines, pipe-smoking, Staten Island, and the Himalayas, and it was evident that she was often with him. Mrs. Golden's method of opposition was very simple. Whenever Una announced that she was going out, her mother's bright, birdlike eyes filmed over; she sighed and hesitated, "Shall I be alone all evening--after all day, too?" Una felt like a brute. She tried to get her mother to go to the Sessionses' flat more often, to make new friends, but Mrs. Golden had lost all her adaptability. She clung to Una and to her old furniture as the only recognizable parts of her world. Often Una felt forced to refuse Walter's invitations; always she refused to walk with him on the long, splendid Saturday afternoons of freedom. Nor would she let him come and sit on the roof with her, lest her mother see them in the hall and be hurt. So it came to pass that only in public did she meet Walter. He showed his resentment by inviting her out less and less, by telling her less and less frankly his ambitions and his daily dabs at becoming a great man. Apparently he was rather interested in a flour-faced actress at his boarding-house. Never, now, did he speak of marriage. The one time when he had spoken of it, Una had been so sure of their happiness that she had thought no more of that formality than had his reckless self. But now she yearned to have him "propose," in the most stupid, conventional, pink-romance fashion. "Why can't we be married?" she fancied herself saying to him, but she never dared say it aloud. Often he was abstracted when he was with her, in the office or out. Always he was kindly, but the kindliness seemed artificial. She could not read his thoughts, now that she had no hand-clasp to guide her. On a hot, quivering afternoon of early July, Walter came to her desk at closing-hour and said, abruptly: "Look. You've simply _got_ to come out with me this evening. We'll dine at a little place at the foot of the Palisades. I can't stand seeing you so little. I won't ask you again! You aren't fair." "Oh, I don't mean to be unfair--" "Will you come? Will you?" His voice glared. Regardless of the office folk about them, he put his hand over hers. She was sure that Miss Moynihan was bulkily watching them. She dared not take time to think. "Yes," she said, "I will go." § 4 It was a beer-garden frequented by yachtless German yachtsmen in shirt-sleeves, boating-caps, and mustaches like muffs, but to Una it was Europe and the banks of the Rhine, that restaurant below the Palisades where she dined with Walter.