Then came the San Francisco earthquake.  That was the end of my Junior year, and we felt we had to be married when I finished college—­nothing else mattered quite as much as that.  So when an offer came out of a clear sky from Halsey and Company, for Carl to be a bond-salesman on a salary that assured matrimony within a year, though in no affluence, and the bottom all out of the law business and no enthusiasm for it anyway, we held a consultation and decided for bonds and marriage.  What a bond-salesman Carl made!  Those who knew him knew what has been referred to as “the magic of his personality,” and could understand how he was having the whole of a small country town asking him to dinner on his second visit.

I somehow got through my Senior year; but how the days dragged!  For all I could think of was Carl, Carl, Carl, and getting married.  Yet no one—­no one on this earth—­ever had the fun out of their engaged days that we did, when we were together.  Carl used to say that the accumulated expenses of courting me for almost four years came to $10.25.  He just guessed at $10.25, though any cheap figure would have done.  We just did not care about doing things that happened to cost money.  We never did care in our lives, and never would have cared, no matter what our income might be.  Undoubtedly that was the main reason we were so blissful on such a small salary in University work—­we could never think, at the time, of anything much we were doing without.  I remember that the happiest Christmas we almost ever had was over in the country, when we spent under two dollars for all of us.  We were absolutely down to bed-rock that year anyway. (It was just after we paid off our European debt.) Carl gave me a book, “The Pastor’s Wife,” and we gloated over it together all Christmas afternoon!  We gave each of the boys a ten-cent cap-pistol and five cents’ worth of caps—­they were in their Paradise.  I mended three shirts of Carl’s that had been in my basket so long they were really like new to him,—­he’d forgotten he owned them!—­laundered them, and hung the trio, tied in tissue paper and red ribbon, on the tree.  That was a Christmas!

He used to claim, too, that, as I got so excited over five cents’ worth of gum-drops, there was no use investing in a dollar’s worth of French mixed candy—­especially if one hadn’t the dollar.  We always loved tramping more than anything else, and just prowling around the streets arm-in-arm, ending perhaps with an ice-cream soda.  Not over-costly, any of it.  I have kept some little reminder of almost every spree we took in our four engaged years—­it is a book of sheer joy from cover to cover.  Except always, always the need of saying good-bye:  it got so that it seemed almost impossible to say it.