“Why not let our moving on coincide?”

It was what, vaguely, in her mind, Roselle meant to do.  She wanted experience; but to gain it comfortably would need a certain amount of financing; and she thought she had tested the fairly satisfactory depth of his pockets, although he had told her nothing.

“I don’t know,” she reserved.  “What are your movements and dates?”

He told her eagerly.

“I’ve always longed to tour Canada,” she cried.

“Then tour it on your own.  Only can’t we be travelling companions?  I’ll see to your tickets and luggage and so on.”

“And I shan’t have any hotel expenses,” she added, lighting a cigarette; “I shall work them off and see a profit.”

Osborn’s year now took on for him the aspect of the most magnificent adventure sated married man ever had.

“Fancy us two trotting about the good old earth together!”

“Don’t tell your friends,” she laughed.

“Trust me.”

“But I don’t.  I don’t trust any of you.”

“You are a tease.  Roselle, it’s so tophole to see you again; let me kiss you good morning.”

She took the cigarette from her mouth to return his kiss; she was bright-eyed and hilarious.  She knew that he was a fool as men were, unless they were brutes; and you had to make the fools whipping-boys for the brutes.  As he kissed her, she knew that she was going to use him; to take all and give nothing.

“You’re the dearest boy.  And how’s the car?”

“She’s first-rate.  Want her this morning?”

“You might run me around in her; job-hunting.”

Into the spring sun they drove; she had the inevitable fur coat and the hat he loved, and she looked beautiful.  By the time he ranked the car outside one of Chicago’s best restaurants for lunch, she had what she called a pocketful of contracts, to sing at this restaurant and that; to dance for her supper and half a guinea at a ruinous night club, for she could do everything a little.  But her greatest asset was her beauty.

CHAPTER XIX

ANOTHER WOOING

Osborn’s letters told Marie very little of his doings; they almost conveyed the impression, though he would have been uneasy to know it, of careful epistles penned by a bad schoolboy.  His letters from Chicago might have been replicas of those from New York; from Montreal he began on the same old note, though, in answer to her request to teach a stay-at-home woman descriptive geography, he once launched forth into an elaborate account of his rail journey on the Canadian Pacific, from Montreal westwards.  Marie was not disappointed in the letters; they were what she would have expected.  But sometimes, as she read their terse and uninteresting sentences, their stodgy bits of information, she smiled to think how marriage changed a man.

How dull it made him!