She then took possession of her little domain.  The clerk, however unbearably, had spoken the truth, and the rooms were charming.  There could be no question, she decided, of going farther.  She spread her pretty wedding silver on the dressing-table, she hung her negligee with her hat and coat in the closet.  She went down on her knees and investigated the slide which was to lead shoes to the bootblack; she tested, with her bridal glove-stretcher, the electrical device in the bathroom for the heating of curling irons.  She studied all the pictures, drew out all the drawers, examined the furniture and bric-a-brac, and then she looked at her watch.  Only half an hour was gone.

She went to the window and watched the hats of the passing multitude, noting how short and fore-shortened all the figures seemed and how queerly the horses passed along beneath her, without visible legs to move them.  Still an hour before John could be expected.

And then their trunks, hers large and his small, made their thumping entrance.  The porter crossed to the window and raised the shade, crossed to her trunk and undid its straps, dried his moistened brow—­and waited.  Marjorie thanked him and smiled.  He smiled and waited, drying his brow industriously the while.  No village black-smith ever had so damp a brow as he.  She sympathized with him in the matter of the heat; he agreed—­and waited.  He undid the straps of John’s trunk; he moved her trunk into greater proximity to the window and the light; he carried John’s trunk into the sitting-room; he performed innumerable feats of prowess before her.  But she only smiled and commended in an unfinancial way.  Finally he laid violent hands upon his truck and retreated into the hall, swearing, as became his age, more luridly than the bellboys.

Once more Marjorie looked out into the street for a while and began to plan the exact form of greeting with which she should meet John.  It already seemed an eternity since she had parted with him.  She drew the pretty evening dress which she had chosen for this and most important evening from its tissue-paper nest in the upper tray of her trunk.  Its daintiness comforted and cheered her, as a friend’s face might have done, and under its impetus she found calm enough to rearrange her hair, and, with many a shy recoil and shy caress, to lay out John’s evening things for him, as she had often laid out her father’s.  How surprised, she smiled, he would be.  How delighted, when he came, to find everything so comfy and domestic.  Surely it was time for him to come.  Presently it was late, and yet he did not come.  She evolved another form of greeting:  he did not deserve comfort and domesticity when he did not set more store on them than on a stupid interview in a stuffy office.  He should see that an appointment with old Nicholson could not be allowed to interfere with their home life; that, simply because they were married now, he could not neglect her with impunity.