hat appeared to be unattainable. To-day she was a married woman
who, a moment ago, had been standing before a minister, binding herself
for good or ill to a man who was delightfully a boy and of whom she
knew next to nothing. What did it matter--what did anything matter--so
long as she achieved her long-dreamed-of ambition to live and see life?

"Then I can go ahead," she added, "and dress as becomes the wife of a
man of one of our best families. I've never been able to dress before.
Trust me to make an excellent beginning." There was a twinkle of humor
in her eyes as she said these things, and excitement too. "Tell me
this, Marty: is it as easy to get unmarried as it is to get married?"

"You're not thinking about that already, surely!"

"Oh, no. But information is always useful, isn't it?"

Just for a moment the boy's heart went down into his boots. She didn't
love him yet; he knew that He intended to earn her love as an honest
man earns his living. What hurt was the note of flippancy in her voice
in talking of an event that was to him so momentous and wonderful. It
seemed to mean no more to her to have entered into a lifelong tie than
the buying of a mere hat--not so much, not nearly so much, as to have
found a way of not going back to those two old people in the country.
She was young, awfully young, he told himself again. Presently her feet
would touch the earth, and she would understand.

As they walked up Fifth Avenue and with little gurgles of enthusiasm
Joan halted at every other shop to look at hats that appealed to Martin
as absurdly, willfully freakish, and evening dresses which seemed
deliberately to have been handed over to a cat to be torn to ribbons,
it came back to him that one just such soft spring evening, the year
before, he had walked home from the Grand Central Station and been
seized suddenly with an almost painful longing to be asked by some
precious person who belonged wholly to him to share her delight in all
the things which then stood for nothing in his life. Then and there he
fulfilled an ambition long cherished and hidden away; he touched Joan
on the arm and opened the elaborate door of a famous jeweler. He was
known to the shop from the fact that he and his father had always dealt
there for wedding and Christmas presents. He was welcomed by a man in
the clothes of a concert singer and with the bedside manner of a family
doctor.

He was desperately self-conscious, and his collar felt t