Outside Inn Part 35

"I suppose you'll want to be married in the courtyard of the Inn,"

d.i.c.k said some weeks later, when they were conventionally ensconced in Nancy's own drawing-room; Hitty happily rattling silverware in the butler's pantry in the rear, "with old Triton blowing his wreathed horn above us, and all the nymphs and gargoyles and Hercules as interested spectators. Well, go as far as you like. I haven't any objection. I'll be married in a Roman bath if you want me to, and eat bran biscuit and hygienic apple sauce for my wedding breakfast."

"Betty and Preston are going to be married at the Inn," Nancy said; "you know her mother's an invalid, and they can't have it at home. Do you know what I'd like to give them as a wedding present?"

"I don't."

"Well, you know, Preston's firm has gone out of existence. The war simply killed it. They haven't much money ahead, and he may have a harder time than he thinks getting located again."

"Yes?"

"I thought I'd like to give them Outside Inn for a wedding present.

Besides, I don't see what else there is to do with it. It's making several hundred a month, now, and promises to make more."

"Good idea," d.i.c.k said.

"You don't seem exceedingly interested."

"Oh, I am," d.i.c.k said, "I'm more interested in our wedding than Betty's wedding present, but that doesn't imply a lack of merit in your idea. _You'll_ want to be married at the Inn, I take it?"

"You'd let me, wouldn't you?"

"Sure I'd let you. When a man marries a modern girl with all the trappings and the suits of modernity, he ought to be prepared to take the consequences cheerfully."

"Then I'm going to surprise you. I don't want anything modern at all about my wedding. I want it in church with a huge bridal bouquet and _Lohengrin_ and white satin; Caroline for my matron of honor and Betty for my bridesmaid, and Sheila for flower girl. I want a wedding breakfast at the Ritz and rice and old shoes--just all the old traditional things."

"Gee whiz," d.i.c.k e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, "is this straight, or are you only making it up to sound good to me? You can have it anyway you like it, you know."

"That's the way I like it," Nancy said. "It's good to be a modern girl, but I really prefer to be an old-fas.h.i.+oned wife--with reservations," she added hastily.

"That's what we all come to in the end," d.i.c.k said, "no matter how we feel or think we feel about it--being modern with reservations."

"I saw Collier Pratt to-day," Nancy said suddenly, as she watched a log split apart in the fireplace and scatter its tiny shower of sparks, "on the avenue."

d.i.c.k carefully stamped out two smoldering places on the rug before he answered.

"Did you?" he said.

"He had a cheap little creature with him, dark haired in messy cerise."

"It may have been his wife. I hear that she's living with him again."

"Is she?"

"Nancy," d.i.c.k said with an effort, after a few minutes of silence, "are you all over that? Is it really fair and right of me to take you?

I've been puzzling over that lately. I want you on any terms, you know, as far as I am concerned, but I'm a sort of monogamist. If a woman has once cared for a person, no matter who or what that person is, can she ever care again in the same way for any one? Isn't it pity you feel for me, after all?"

"No it isn't pity," Nancy said slowly. "I cared for that man until I found that he was the shadow and not the substance. He isn't fit to black your shoes, d.i.c.k.--Besides--if--if it was pity," she added irrelevantly, "that's the way to get me started, you know."

"If I only have got you started--really."

Nancy crossed the two feet of s.p.a.ce between them and sank at his feet, leaning her head back against his knee while he stroked her hair silently.

"There's one way of proving," she said presently, "if--if you've made a woman really care for you. I should think you'd know that. I told you how you'd made me feel about the bridal bouquet and _Lohengrin_."

"Does that prove something?"

"Doesn't it?"

"I suppose it does. You mean it proves that a woman truly loves a man if he's made her feel that she wants to be an old-fas.h.i.+oned wife--"

"And mother, d.i.c.k," Nancy finished for him bravely.

THE END