“Because,” she began to explain, then hesitated, and looked at him.  Perhaps it was in his face; perhaps it was that she remembered at this point the serious difference between the price of Lady Baltimore (by my small bill-of-fare I was now made acquainted with its price) and the cost of that rich article which convention has prescribed as the cake for weddings; at any rate, swift, sudden delicacy of feeling prevented her explaining any more to him, for she saw how it was:  his means were too humble for the approved kind of wedding cake!  She was too young, too unskilled yet in the world’s ways, to rise above her embarrassment; and so she stood blushing at him behind the counter, while he stood blushing at her in front of it.

At length he succeeded in speaking.  “That’s all, I believe. 
Good-morning.”

At his hastily departing back she, too, murmured:  “Good-morning.”

Before I knew it I had screamed out loudly from my table:  “But he hasn’t told you the day he wants it for!”

Before she knew it she had flown to the door—­my cry had set her going, as if I had touched a spring—­and there he was at the door himself, rushing back.  He, too, had remembered.  It was almost a collision, and nothing but their good Southern breeding, the way they took it, saved it from being like a rowdy farce.

“I know,” he said simply and immediately.  “I am sorry to be so careless.  It’s for the twenty-seventh.”

She was writing it down in the order-book.  “Very well.  That is Wednesday of next week.  You have given us more time than we need.”  She put complete, impersonal business into her tone; and this time he marched off in good order, leaving peace in the Woman’s Exchange.

No, not peace; quiet, merely; the girl at the counter now proceeded to grow indignant with me.  We were alone together, we two; no young man, or any other business, occupied her or protected me.  But if you suppose that she made war, or expressed rage by speaking, that is not it at all.  From her counter in front to my table at the back she made her displeasure felt; she was inaudibly crushing; she did not do it even with her eye, she managed it—­well, with her neck, somehow, and by the way she made her nose look in profile.  Aunt Carola would have embraced her—­and I should have liked to do so myself.  She could not stand the idea of my having, after all these days of official reserve that she had placed between us, startled her into that rush to the door annihilated her dignity at a blow.  So did I finish my sandwiches beneath her invisible but eloquent fire.  What affair of mine was the cake?  And what sort of impertinent, meddlesome person was I, shrieking out my suggestions to people with whom I had no acquaintance?  These were the things that her nose and her neck said to me the whole length of the Exchange.  I had nothing but my own weakness to thank; it was my interest in weddings that did it, made me forget my decorum, the public place, myself, everything, and plunge in.  And I became more and more delighted over it as the girl continued to crush me.  My day had been dull, my researches had not brought me a whit nearer royal blood; I looked at my little bill-of-fare, and then I stepped forward to the counter, adventurous, but polite.