as she was going to shut up
the office for the night, and go in to see the dancing in the main
dining-room, and perhaps be asked to dance herself by some of the
clerks.

At the sound of a pencil tapping on the ledge of the little window in
the cast-iron filagree wall of her den, she turned quickly round ready
to cry with disappointment; but at sight of Pinney with his blue eyes,
and his brown fringe of moustache curling closely in over his lip, under
his short, straight nose, and a funny cleft in his chin, she felt more
like laughing, somehow, as she had since told him a hundred times. He
wrote back to her from Boston, on some pretended business; and they
began to correspond, as they called it; and they were engaged before the
summer was over. They had never yet tired of talking about that first
meeting, or of talking about themselves and each other in any aspect.
They found out, as soon as they were engaged, and that sort of social
splendor which young people wear to each other's eyes had passed, that
they were both rather simple and harmless folks, and they began to value
each other as being good. This tendency only grew upon them with the
greater intimacy of marriage. The chief reason for thinking that they
were good was that they loved each other so much; she knew that he was
good because he loved her; and he believed that he must have a great
deal of good in him, if such a girl loved him so much. They thought it a
virtue to exist solely for one another as they did; their mutual
devotion seemed to them a form of unselfishness. They felt it a great
merit to be frugal and industrious that they might prosper; they
prospered solely to their own advantage, but the advantage of persons so
deserving through their frugality and industry seemed a kind of
altruism; it kept them in constant good humor with themselves, and
content with each other. They had risked a great deal in getting married
on Pinney's small salary, but apparently their courage had been
rewarded, and they were not finally without the sense that their
happiness had been achieved somehow in the public interest.

XV.

Maxwell's headache went off after his cup of tea, but when he reached
the house in Clover Street, where he had a room in the boarding-house
his mother kept, he was so tired that he wanted to go to bed. He told
her he was not tired; only disappointed with his afternoon's work.

"I didn't get very much. Why, of course, there was a lot o