“I am deliciously happy,” said Norma.
She went to bed laughing at the discomfiture of Weever and the
remoteness of him and of the days last summer when she first met him
among the Monzies' disreputable crowd. He belonged to a former state
of existence. Jimmie's portrait, which had been put for two or three
reasons in her bedroom, caught her attention. She looked at it with
a dreamy smile for a long time, and then turned to the glass. Made
curiously happy by what she saw there, she kissed her fingers to the
portrait.
“He is the better prophet,” she said.
But Connie's advice as to the desirability of a speedy marriage remained
in her mind. Jimmie with characteristic diffidence had not yet suggested
definite arrangements. She was gifted with so much insight as to
apprehend the reasons for his lack of initiative. His very worship of
her, his overwhelming sense of goddess-conferred boon in her every smile
and condescension, precluded the asking of favours. So far it was she
who had arranged their daily life. It was she who had established the
custom of the studio visits, and she had taken off her hat and had
inaugurated the comedy of the domestic felicities of her own accord. She
treasured this worship in her heart as a priceless thing, all the
more exquisite because it lay by the side of the knowledge of her own
unworthiness. The sacrifice of maidenly modesty in proposing instead
of coyly yielding was at once a delicious penance for hypocritical
assumption of superiority, and a salve to her pride as a beautiful and
desirable woman. It was with a glorious sureness of relation, therefore,
that she asked him the next day if he had thought of a date for their
marriage.
“There is no reason for a long engagement that I can see,” she added,
with a blush which she felt, and was tremulously happy at feeling.
“I was waiting for you to say, dear,” he replied, his arm around her. “I
dared not ask.”
She laughed the deep laugh of a woman's happiness.
“I knew you would say that,” she murmured. “Let it be some time next
month.”
Chapter XXVI--EARTH AGAIN