s harassing, it was wearying. But always every few
days there would be that telephone ring which I grew both to dread and
to love. For as often as it said, "I've got to go to Tacoma," it also
said, "You Girl, put on your hat and coat this minute and come down town
while I have a few minutes off--we'll have supper together anyhow."

And the feeling of the courting days never left us--that almost sharp
joy of being together again when we just locked arms for a block and
said almost nothing--nothing to repeat. And the good-bye that always
meant a wrench, always, though it might mean being together within a few
hours. And always the waving from the one on the back of the car to the
one standing on the corner. Nothing, nothing, ever got tame. After ten
years, if Carl ever found himself a little early to catch the train for
Tacoma, say, though he had said good-bye but a half an hour before and
was to be back that evening, he would find a telephone-booth and ring up
to say, perhaps, that he was glad he had married me! Mrs. Willard once
said that after hearing Carl or me talk to the other over the telephone,
it made other husbands and wives when they telephoned sound as if they
must be contemplating divorce. But telephoning was an event: it was a
little extra present from Providence, as it were.

And I think of two times when we met accidentally on the street in
Seattle--it seemed something we could hardly believe: all the world--the
war, commerce, industry--stopped while we tried to realize what had
happened.

Then, every night that he had to be out,--and he had to be out night
after night in Seattle,--I would hear his footstep coming down the
street; it would wake me, though he wore rubber heels. He would fix the
catch on the front-door lock, then come upstairs, calling out softly,
"You awake?" He always knew I was. Then, sitting on the edge of the bed,
he would tell all the happenings since I had seen him last. Once in a
while he'd sigh and say, "A little ranch up on the Clearwater would go
pretty well about now, wouldn't it, my girl?" And I would sigh, and say,
"Oh dear, wouldn't it?"

I remember once, when we were first married, he got home one afternoon
before I did. When I opened the door to our little Seattle apartment,
there he was, walking the floor, looking as if the bottom had dropped
out of the universe. "I've had the most awful twenty minutes," he
informed me, "simply terrible. Promise me absolutely that never,