“I’ve got a cab—­the last one,” said George, pushing his way through the crowd, and laying his hand on her arm with a possessive and authoritative touch.  “Let me put you in, and then I’ll speak to the driver.”

As he gave the address she watched him, still fascinated with the delicious strangeness of it all.  It was like an adventure to have George whisk her so peremptorily into a cab, and then stand with his foot on the step while he curtly directed the driver.  Nothing could surpass the romance—­the supreme exciting romance of life.  Every minute was an event; every act of George’s was as thrilling as a moment in melodrama.  And as they drove through the streets, over the pale bands of sunshine, she had a sense of lightness and wonder, as if she were driving in a world of magic toward ineffable happiness.

“Isn’t it strange to be here together, George?” she said.  “I can hardly believe it.”  But in her heart she was thinking:  “I shall never want anything but love in my life.  If I have George I shall never want anything else.”  The bedraggled, slatternly figures of the women sweeping the pavements in the cross-street through which they were driving filled her with a fugitive sadness, so faint, so pale that it hardly dimmed the serene brightness of her mood.  “I wish they were all as happy as I am,” she thought; “and they might be if they only knew the secret of happiness.  If they only knew that nothing in the world matters when one has love in one’s heart.”

“You’ll believe it soon enough when we turn into Fifth Avenue,” replied George, glancing with disgust out of the window.  A month of intimacy had increased the power of his smile over her senses, and when he turned to her again after a minute, she felt something of the faint delicious tremor of their first meeting.  Already she was beginning to discover that beyond his expressive eyes he had really very little of importance to express, that his prolonged silences covered poverty of ideas rather than abundance of feeling, that his limited vocabulary was due less to reticence than to the simple inarticulateness of the primitive mind.  Through the golden glamour of her honeymoon there had loomed suddenly the discovery that George was not clever—­but cleverness mattered so little, she told herself, as long as he loved her.

“I hope your mother will like me,” she said nervously after a minute.

“I’ll be sorry for her if she doesn’t.”

“Do I look nice?”

“Of course you do.  I never saw you when you didn’t.”

“I feel so dreadfully untidy.  I never tried to dress in a sleeping-car before.”

“It did rock, didn’t it?”