Once she sat on the edge of the packing-case, dallying a hammer, then laid it aside suddenly, to cross the littered room and place the side of her head to the immaculate waistcoat of Mr. Jimmie Batch, red-faced, too, over wrenching up with hatchet-edge a barrel-top.

“Jimmie darling, I—­I just never will get over your finding this place for us.”

Mr. Batch wiped his forearm across his brow, his voice jerking between the squeak of nails extracted from wood.

“It was you, honey.  You give me the to-let ad, and I came to look, that’s all.”

“Just the samey, it was my boy found it.  If you hadn’t come to look we might have been forced into taking that old dark coop over on Simpson Street.”

“What’s all this junk in this barrel?”

“Them’s kitchen utensils, honey.”

“Kitchen what?”

“Kitchen things that you don’t know nothing about except to eat good things out of.”

“What’s this?”

“Don’t bend it!  That’s a celery-brush.  Ain’t it cute?”

“A celery-brush!  Why didn’t you get it a comb, too?”

“Aw, now, honey-bee, don’t go trying to be funny and picking through these things you don’t know nothing about!  They’re just cute things I’m going to cook something grand suppers in, for my something awful bad boy.”

He leaned down to kiss her at that.  “Gee!”

She was standing, her shoulder to him and head thrown back against his chest.  She looked up to stroke his cheek, her face foreshortened.

“I’m all black and blue pinching myself, Jimmie.”

“Me too.”

“Every night when I get home from working here in the flat I say to myself in the looking-glass, I say, ’Gertie Slayback, what if you’re only dreamin’?’”

“Me too.”

“I say to myself, ’Are you sure that darling flat up there, with the new pink-and-white wall-paper and the furniture arriving every day, is going to be yours in a few days when you’re Mrs. Jimmie Batch?’”

“Mrs. Jimmie Batch—­say, that’s immense.”

“I keep saying it to myself every night, ‘One day less.’  Last night it was two days.  To-night it’ll be—­one day, Jimmie, till I’m—­her.”

She closed her eyes and let her hand linger up at his cheek, head still back against him, so that, inclining his head, he could rest his lips in the ash-blond fluff of her hair.

“Talk about can’t wait!  If to-morrow was any farther off they’d have to sweep out a padded cell for me.”

She turned to rumple the smooth light thatch of his hair.  “Bad boy!  Can’t wait!  And here we are getting married all of a sudden, just like that.  Up to the time of this draft business, Jimmie Batch, ‘pretty soon’ was the only date I could ever get out of you, and now here you are crying over one day’s wait.  Bad honey boy!”

He reached back for the pink newspaper so habitually protruding from his hip pocket.  “You ought to see the way they’re neck-breaking for the marriage-license bureaus since the draft.  First thing we know, tine whole shebang of the boys will be claiming the exemption of sole support of wife.”