In her brief letter the girl showed that, young though she was and not widely experienced in life, she yet had seen the horrors of city poverty, how it poisons and kills all the fine emotions.  She had seen many a loving young couple start out confidently, with a few hundred dollars of debt for furniture—­had seen the love fade and wither, shrivel, die—­had seen appear peevishness and hatred and unfaithfulness and all the huge, foul weeds that choke the flowers of married life.  She knew what her lover’s salary would buy—­and what it would not buy—­for two.  She could imagine their fate if there should be three or more.  She showed frankly her selfishness of renunciation.  But there could be read between the lines—­concealed instead of vaunted—­perhaps unsuspected—­her unselfishness of renunciation for the sake of her lover and for the sake of the child or the children that might be.  In our love of moral sham and glitter, we overlook the real beauties of human morality; we even are so dim or vulgar sighted that we do not see them when they are shown to us.

As Norman awakened, he reached for the telephone, said to the boy in charge of the club exchange:  “Look in the book, find the number of a lawyer named Branscombe, and connect me with his office.”  After some confusion and delay he got the right office, but Dorothy was out at lunch.  He left a message that she was to call him up at the club as soon as she came in.  He was shaving when the bell rang.

He was at the receiver in a bound.  “Is it you?” he said.

“Yes,” came in her quiet, small voice.

“Will you resign down there to-day?  Will you marry me this afternoon?”

A brief silence, then—­“Yes.”

Thus it came about that they met at the City Hall license bureau, got their license, and half an hour later were married at the house of a minister in East Thirty-third Street, within a block of the Subway station.  He was feverish, gay, looked years younger than his thirty-seven.  She was quiet, dim, passive, neither grave nor gay, but going through her part without hesitation, with much the same patient, plodding expression she habitually bore as she sat working at her machine—­as if she did not quite understand, but was doing her best and hoped to get through not so badly.

“I’ve had nothing to eat,” said he as they came out of the parsonage.

“Nor I,” said she.

“We’ll go to Delmonico’s,” said he, and hailed a passing taxi.

On the way, he sitting in one corner explained to her, shrunk into the other corner:  “I can confess now that I married you under false pretenses.  I am not prosperous, as I used to be.  To be brief and plain, I’m down and out, professionally.”

She did not move.  Apparently she did not change expression.  Yet he, speaking half banteringly, felt some frightful catastrophe within her.  “You are—­poor?” she said in her usual quiet way.

“We are poor,” corrected he.  “I have at present only a thousand dollars a month—­a little more, but not enough to talk about.”