And indeed to a casual glance she looked the happy bride trying—­not very successfully—­to seem used to her husband and her new status.

“Hold it!” he urged gayly.  “I’ve no fancy for leading round a lovely martyr in chains.  Especially as you’re about as healthy and well placed a person as I know.  And you’ll feel as well as you look when you’ve had something to eat.”

Whether it was obedience or the result of a decision to drop an unprofitable pose he could not tell, but as soon as they were seated and she had a bill of fare before her and was reading it, her expression of happiness lost its last suggestion of being forced.  “Crab meat!” she said.  “I love it!”

“Two portions of crab meat,” he said to the waiter with pad and pencil at attention.

“Oh, I don’t want that much,” she protested.

“You forget that I am hungry,” rejoined he.  “And when I am hungry, the price of food begins to go up.”  He addressed himself to the waiter:  “After that a broiled grouse—­with plenty of hominy—­and grilled sweet potatoes—­and a salad of endive and hothouse tomatoes—­and I know the difference between hothouse tomatoes and the other kinds.  Next—­some cheese—­Coullomieres—­yes, you have it—­I got the steward to get it—­and toasted crackers—­the round kind, not the square—­and not the hard ones that unsettle the teeth—­and—­what kind of ice, my dear?—­or would you prefer a fresh peach flambee?”

“Yes—­I think so,” said Dorothy.

“You hear, waiter?—­and a bottle of—­there’s the head waiter—­ask him—­he knows the champagne I like.”

As Norman had talked, in the pleasant, insistent voice, the waiter had roused from the air of mindless, mechanical sloth characteristic of the New York waiter—­unless and until a fee below his high expectation is offered.  When he said the final “very good, sir,” it was with the accent of real intelligence.

Dorothy was smiling, with the amusement of youth and inexperience.  “What a lot of trouble you took about it,” said she.

He shrugged his shoulders.  “Anything worth doing at all is worth taking trouble about.  You will see.  We shall get results.  The supper will be the best this house can put together.”

“You can have anything you want in this world, if you only can pay for it,” said she.

“That’s what most people think,” replied he.  “But the truth is, the paying is only a small part of the art of getting what one wants.”

She glanced nervously at him.  “I’m beginning to realize that I’m dreadfully inexperienced,” said she.

“There’s nothing discouraging in that,” said he.  “Lack of experience can be remedied.  But not lack of judgment.  It takes the great gift of judgment to enable one to profit by mistakes, to decide what is the real lesson of an experience.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t any judgment, either,” confessed she.

“That remains to be seen.”