第96章

He had once heard Little Ann talking to Mrs.Bowse about the price of frying-pans and kettles, and they seemed to cost next to nothing.He'd looked into store windows and noticed the prices of groceries and vegetables and things like that--sugar, for instance; two people wouldn't use much sugar in a week--and they wouldn't need a ton of tea or flour or coffee.If a fellow had a mother or sister or wife who had a head and knew about things, you could "put it over" on mighty little, and have a splendid time together, too.You'd even be able to work in a cheap seat in a theater every now and then.He laughed and flushed as he thought of it.

Miss Alicia had never had a doll's house.Rowcroft Vicarage did not run to dolls and their belongings.Her thwarted longing for a doll's house had a sort of parallel in her similarly thwarted longing for "a little boy."And here was her doll's house so long, so long unpossessed! It was like that, this absorbed contriving and fitting of furniture into corners.She also flushed and laughed.Her eyes were so brightly eager and her cheeks so pink that she looked quite girlish under her lace cap.

"How pretty and cozy it might be made, how dear!" she exclaimed."And one would be so high up on the eleventh floor, that one would feel like a bird in a nest."His face lighted.He seemed to like the idea tremendously.

"Why, that's so," he laughed."That idea suits me down to the ground.

A bird in a nest.But there'd have to be two.One would be lonely.

Say, Miss Alicia, how would you like to live in a place like that?""I am sure any one would like it--if they had some dear relative with them."He loved her "dear relative," loved it.He knew how much it meant of what had lain hidden unacknowledged, even unknown to her, through a lifetime in her early-Victorian spinster breast.

"Let's go to New York and rent one and live in it together.Would you come?" he said, and though he laughed, he was not jocular in the usual way."Would you, if we waked up and found this Temple Barholm thing was a dream?"Something in his manner, she did not know what, puzzled her a little.

"But if it were a dream, you would be quite poor again," she said, smiling.

"No, I wouldn't.I'd get Galton to give me back the page.He'd do it quick--quick," he said, still with a laugh."Being poor's nothing, anyhow.We'd have the time of our lives.We'd be two birds in a nest.

You can look out those eleventh- story windows 'way over to the Bronx, and get bits of the river.And perhaps after a while Ann would do -like she said, and we'd be three birds."

"Oh!" she sighed ecstatically."How beautiful it would be! We should be a little family!""So we should," he exulted."Think of T.T.with a family!" He drew his paper of calculations toward him again."Let's make believe we're going to do it, and work out what it would cost - for three.You know about housekeeping, don't you? Let's write down a list."If he had warmed to his work before, he warmed still more after this.

Miss Alicia was drawn into it again, and followed his fanciful plans with a new fervor.They were like two children who had played at make-believe until they had lost sight of commonplace realities.