aspirations, gorgeous and tangental as comets are. There had been the colorless ether of which dreams are made. For cosmic matter there was love. A year had gone. In it, these wonders had formed and fled.
Marie got from the piano. It had no secret to tell. But there was another which the year had revealed, a secret which, at first opaque and obscure, little by little had taken shape and changed from an impossibility into a monstrous fact. Marie had begun by disavowing it. She had disowned it, would have none of it. But disavowals cease. In certain conditions we get used to monsters. The soul makes itself at home with what it must. The monster to which Marie was accustoming herself was the knowledge that her lover had lied.
In departing with him from the den of the ex-first lady it was not merely with faith and trust, but with absolute certainty that marriage, if delayed, was only postponed; that a week, a month at the furthest, would see her his wife.
On the way she had stopped and wired to Gay Street, telling her father not to worry, that she had gone to be married, that she would write to him soon.
Whether he had worried she could only surmise. But soon she had written, enclosing a photograph of Loftus, one which she had colored, an excellent likeness that displayed his chiseled features, wonderful eyes and thin, black mustache with a perfection of precision that was lifelike. Above it she wrote: “Marie’s Husband.” It would please her father, she was sure, and in the letter she told him prettily, in a little, cajoling way which he loved, that while, for the moment, he must not know where she was, yet shortly she was planning to come and surprise him—to surprise him more than he could ever imagine, and show him that he could be very, very proud of her, but prouder still, much, much prouder of the man she had married.