“Then listen!  Don’t think!  Here’s what I want you to do!  Get a two-weeks leave from your office.  Weather’s beginning to get chilly here.  Let’s run down to Charleston and Savannah and maybe Florida.

“A second honeymoon?” indecisively.

“No.  Don’t even call it that.  Call it a second wooing.  I won’t ask anything.  I just want the chance to chase around with you.  I guess I never appreciated how lucky I was to have a girl with imagination and lively feet to play with.  So——­Could you maybe run away and see the South with me?  If you wanted to, you could just—­you could just pretend you were my sister and——­I’ll get an extra nurse for Hugh!  I’ll get the best dog-gone nurse in Washington!”

VII

It was in the Villa Margherita, by the palms of the Charleston Battery and the metallic harbor, that her aloofness melted.

When they sat on the upper balcony, enchanted by the moon glitter, she cried, “Shall I go back to Gopher Prairie with you?  Decide for me.  I’m tired of deciding and undeciding.”

“No.  You’ve got to do your own deciding.  As a matter of fact, in spite of this honeymoon, I don’t think I want you to come home.  Not yet.”

She could only stare.

“I want you to be satisfied when you get there.  I’ll do everything I can to keep you happy, but I’ll make lots of breaks, so I want you to take time and think it over.”

She was relieved.  She still had a chance to seize splendid indefinite freedoms.  She might go—­oh, she’d see Europe, somehow, before she was recaptured.  But she also had a firmer respect for Kennicott.  She had fancied that her life might make a story.  She knew that there was nothing heroic or obviously dramatic in it, no magic of rare hours, nor valiant challenge, but it seemed to her that she was of some significance because she was commonplaceness, the ordinary life of the age, made articulate and protesting.  It had not occurred to her that there was also a story of Will Kennicott, into which she entered only so much as he entered into hers; that he had bewilderments and concealments as intricate as her own, and soft treacherous desires for sympathy.

Thus she brooded, looking at the amazing sea, holding his hand.

VIII

She was in Washington; Kennicott was in Gopher Prairie, writing as dryly as ever about water-pipes and goose-hunting and Mrs. Fageros’s mastoid.

She was talking at dinner to a generalissima of suffrage.  Should she return?

The leader spoke wearily: 

“My dear, I’m perfectly selfish.  I can’t quite visualize the needs of your husband, and it seems to me that your baby will do quite as well in the schools here as in your barracks at home.”

“Then you think I’d better not go back?” Carol sounded disappointed.