He kissed her again and hurried out of the office....  Boarding the train just as it was about to start, he settled himself in the back seat of the smoker, lit a cigar, inhaling deep breaths of the smoke and scarcely noticing an acquaintance who greeted him from the aisle.  Well, he had done it!  He was amazed.  He had not intended to propose marriage, and when he tried to review the circumstances that had led to this he became confused.  But when he asked himself whether indeed he were willing to pay such a price, to face the revolution marriage—­and this marriage in particular—­would mean in his life, the tumult in his blood beat down his incipient anxieties.  Besides, he possessed the kind of mind able to throw off the consideration of possible consequences, and by the time the train had slowed down in the darkness of the North Station in Boston all traces of worry had disappeared.  The future would take care of itself.

For the Bumpus family, supper that evening was an unusually harmonious meal.  Hannah’s satisfaction over the new stove had by no means subsided, and Edward ventured, without reproof, to praise the restored quality of the pie crust.  And in contrast to her usual moroseness and self-absorption, even Lise was gay—­largely because her pet aversion, the dignified and allegedly amorous Mr. Waiters, floor-walker at the Bagatelle, had fallen down the length of the narrow stairway leading from the cashier’s cage.  She became almost hysterical with glee as she pictured him lying prone beneath the counter dedicated to lingerie, draped with various garments from the pile that toppled over on him.  “Ruby Nash picked a brassiere off his whiskers!” Lise shrieked.  “She gave the pile a shove when he landed.  He’s got her number all right.  But say, it was worth the price of admission to see that old mutt when he got up, he looked like Santa Claus.  All the girls in the floor were there we nearly split trying to keep from giving him the ha-ha.  And Ruby says, sympathetic, as she brushed him off, `I hope you ain’t hurt, Mr. Waiters.’  He was sore!  He went around all afternoon with a bunch on his coco as big as a potato.”  So vivid was Lise’s account of this affair which apparently she regarded as compensation for many days of drudgery-that even Hannah laughed, though deploring a choice of language symbolic of a world she feared and detested.

“If I talked like you,” said Lise, “they wouldn’t understand me.”

Janet, too, was momentarily amused, drawn out of that reverie in which she had dwelt all day, ever since Ditmar had left for Boston.  Now she began to wonder what would happen if she were suddenly to announce “I’m going to marry Mr. Ditmar.”  After the first shock of amazement, she could imagine her father’s complete and complacent acceptance of the news as a vindication of an inherent quality in the Bumpus blood.  He would begin to talk about the family.  For, despite what might have been deemed a somewhat disillusionizing experience, in