es every night--ugh! When I see some of the girls who
used to be so pretty and gay, and they went and married poor men--now
they are so worn and tired and bedraggled and perambulatorious, and
they worry about Biddies and furnaces and cabbages, and their hair is
just scratched together, with the dubbest hats--I'd rather be an idle
rich."

"If we got stuck like that, I'd sell out and we'd hike to the mountain
cabin, anyway, say go up in the Santa Lucias, and keep wild bees."

"And probably get stung--in the many subtle senses of that word. And
I'd have to cook and wash. That would be fun _as_ fun, but to have to
do it----"

"Ruth, honey, let's not worry about it now, anyhow. I don't believe
there's much danger. And don't let's spoil this bully day."

"It has been sweet. I won't croak any more."

"There's the train coming."

CHAPTER XXXVIII

While the New York June grew hotter and hotter and stickier and
stickier, while the crowds, crammed together in the subway in a jam as
unlovely as a pile of tomato-cans on a public dump-heap, grew pale in
the damp heat, Carl labored in his office, and almost every evening
called on Ruth, who was waiting for the first of July, when she was to
go to Cousin Patton Kerr's, in the Berkshires. Carl tried to bring her
coolness. He ate only poached eggs on toast or soup and salad for
dinner, that he might not be torpid. He gave her moss-roses with drops
of water like dew on the stems. They sat out on the box-stoop--the
unfriendly New York street adopting for a time the frank
neighborliness of a village--and exclaimed over every breeze. They
talked about the charm of forty degrees below zero. That is,
sometimes. Their favorite topic was themselves.

She still insisted that she was not in love with him; hooted at the
idea of being engaged. She might some day go off and get married to
some one, but engaged? Never! She finally agreed that they were
engaged to be engaged to be engaged. One night when they sought the
windy housetop, she twined his arms about her and almost went to
sleep, with her hair smooth beneath his chin. He sat motionless till
his arms ached with the strain, till her shoulder seemed to stick into
his like a bar of iron; glad that she trusted him enough to doze into
warm slumber in the familiarity of his arms. Yet he dared not kiss her
throat, as he had done at Long Beach.

As lovers do, Carl had thought intently of her warning that she did
care for clothes,