with that instead of something else that she refused it.

It came lunch-time, and he invited her to go out to lunch with him;
and when she declined with dignity he argued that if they went to the
Woman's Exchange she would be properly chaperoned by the genius of the
place; besides, it was the only place in town where you got real
strawberry shortcake. She was ashamed of liking it all; he besought
her to let him carry her hand-bag for her, and, as he already had it,
she could not prevent him; she did not know, really, how far she
might successfully forbid him in anything. At the street door of the
apartment-house they found her mother getting out of a cab, and she
asked Peter in to lunch; so that Charlotte might as well have lunched
with him at the Woman's Exchange.

At all storage warehouses there is a season in autumn when the
corridors are heaped with the incoming furniture of people who have
decided that they cannot pass another winter in New York and are
breaking up housekeeping to go abroad indefinitely. But in the spring,
when the Constitutional Safe-Deposit offered ample space for
thoughtful research, the meetings of Charlotte and Peter could recur
without more consciousness of the advance they were making toward the
fated issue than in so many encounters at tea or luncheon or dinner.
Mrs. Forsyth was insisting on rather a drastic overhauling of her
storage that year. Some of the things, by her command, were shifted to
and fro between the more modern rooms and the old ancestral room, and
Charlotte had to verify the removals. In deciding upon goods selected
for the country she had the help of Peter, and she helped him by
interposing some useful hesitations in the case of things he had put
aside from his mother's possessions to be sold for her by the
warehouse people.

One day he came late and told Charlotte that his mother had suddenly
taken her passage for England, and they were sailing the next morning.
He said, as if it logically followed, that he had been in love with
her from that earliest time when she would not give him the least of
her possessions, and now he asked her if she would not promise him the
greatest. She did not like what she felt "rehearsed" in his proposal;
it was not her idea of a proposal, which ought to be spontaneous and
unpremeditated in terms; at the same time, she resented his
precipitation, which she could not deny was inevitable.

She perceived that they were sitting side by side