“Well,” Harriet said, “I met Royal Blondin one night.  He lived in our town—­Watertown.  He had a dreadful, artificial sort of mother.  My sister didn’t approve of her at all.  A friend of his named Street was an artist, and he had a nice little wife, and a baby, and they lived in a big, barnlike sort of studio.  It seemed wonderful to me.  They loved each other, and their baby, but they were so free!  They would have the whole crowd to dinner, twenty of us, bread and red wine and macaroni and music and talk, it was wonderful—­or I thought so!  It was so different from Linda’s ideas, of frosted layer-cake, and chopped nuts, and Five Hundred.  I loved the studio, and they—­they all loved me, and he—­Royal—­ loved me especially.  He used to talk about Yogi philosophy and Oriental religions and poetry, and after awhile it was understood among them all that he loved me, and I him.  And we were engaged.  Of course Linda suspected, and there was opposition at home, but in the studio, helping the Streets get their suppers, it seemed so right—­so simple!  Royal said he did not believe in the orthodox ceremony of marriage.  He argued that no one could live up to its promises, and I believed him.  Miriam Street, the artist’s wife, was a poet, and she wrote the ceremony by which we were married.  We had a big supper, and they were all there, and this poem—­this marriage poem—­was beautiful.  It was published in a magazine, afterward, and called ‘A Marriage for True Lovers’.  It had a part for the woman to say, and a part for the man, and Royal and I said those, and then it had a part for the woman’s friend, and the man’s friend, and for all their friends.  And then there was a promise that when love failed on either side, the two were free, to keep the memory of the perfect love unstained by the ugly years.”

She paused; Richard did not speak.  She had told him this much in a simple, childish voice, a voice that was an echo of that old time, he knew.  Presently she went on: 

“There was music, and then they all kissed me, and we had supper, and they drank our health.  I went back that night to my sister’s; Royal stayed with his mother.  We planned to go away on our honeymoon the next day.  I did not tell Linda and Fred that I considered myself married.  I knew they would not understand and would try to interfere.

“The next morning I slipped away from the house, with my suitcase, and I met Royal Blondin downtown.  We motored to Syracuse, and took a train there for New York.  I had felt sick when I awakened—­it was partly excitement, and partly the supper the night before, when we had all eaten and drunk too much.  But I was very sick in the train, I thought I was going to die.  Royal persuaded me to eat my lunch in the dining car, and that only made me worse.  There was a nice woman in the train, with two little girls, and she took care of me.  And when she got to New York—­I had told her that I was on my wedding journey, and perhaps that made her kind—­she took us to her boarding-house, in West Forty-sixth Street.  The landlady was a dear, good woman, a Mrs. Harrington, and—­I was very sick by this time!—­she put me into her own room, because the house was full, and sent for her own doctor.