ho let you call it Granville?" But he knew. Nobody, indeed,
knew better than Ranny how tight a squeeze it was; and what a horrible
misfit for Granville.

Then suddenly something in the idea of Granville tickled him.

"Whether is it," he inquired, "that the drawing-room suite is too large
for Granville? Or that Granville is too small for the drawing-room
suite?"

"It's too small for anything. And I think you might have waited."

"Waited?"

"Yes. Why shouldn't we have gone on as we were?"

He couldn't criticize her in a moment that was still so blessed;
otherwise it might have struck him that Granville was certainly too
small for Violet's voice.

But it struck Ranny's mother as she heard it from the bedroom overhead,
where she labored, spreading with her own hands the sheets for her son's
marriage bed.

"Why shouldn't we?" Violet's voice insisted.

"Because we couldn't."

He drew her to him. Her eyes closed and their faces met, flame to flame.

"Poor little thing," he said. "Is its head hot? And is it tired?"

"Ranny," she said, "is your mother still upstairs?"

"She'll be gone in a minute," he whispered, thickly.

CHAPTER XIV

Violet's connection with Starker's ceased on the day of her marriage.
Violet herself would have continued it; she had meant to continue it;
she had fought the point passionately with Ranny; but Ranny had put his
foot down with a firmness that subdued her. She had said, "Oh,
well--just as you like. If you think you can get along without my pound
a week." And Ranny, with considerable warmth, had answered back that he
hoped to Heaven he could. And then, again and again, with infinite
patience and gentleness, he explained that the privileges of acquiring
Granville entailed duties and responsibilities incompatible with her
attendance in Starker's Millinery Saloons. He pointed out that if they
were dependent upon Granville, Granville was also dependent upon them.
Granville, she could see for herself, was helpless--pathetic he was.

And Violet would laugh. In those first days he could always make her
laugh by playing with the personality they had created. She would come
out into the roadway on an August morning, as Ranny was going off to
Woolridge's, and they would look at the absurd little house where it
stood winking and blinking in the sun; and morning after morning Ranny
kept it up.

"Look at him," he would say, "sittin' there behind his little railin's,
sayin' nothing, j