Young People's Pride Part 31

"_I_ am. And everybody's being so nice about giving us checks we can use instead of a lot of silly things we wouldn't know what to do with." She smiles. "Those are your feet," she announces gravely.

"Yes. Well?"

"Oh, nothing. Only I'm going to tickle them."

"You're not? Ouch--Nancy, you _little devil_!" and Oliver slides hastily to the floor. Then he goes over to the port-hole.

"A very nice day!" he announces in the face of a bull's eye view of dull skies and oily dripping sea.

"Is it? How kind of it! Ollie, I must get up." "Nancy, you must." He goes over and kneels awkwardly by the side of her berth--an absurd figure enough no doubt in tortoise-sh.e.l.l spectacles and striped pajamas, but Nancy doesn't think so. As for him he simply knows he never will get used to having her with him this way all the time; he takes his breath delicately whenever he thinks of it, as if, if he weren't very careful always about being quiet she might disappear any instant like a fairy back into a book.

He kisses her.

"Good morning, Nancy."

Her arms go round him.

"Good morning, dearest."

"It isn't that I don't want to get up, really," she explains presently.

"It's only that I like lying here and thinking about all the things that are going to happen."

"We are lucky, you know. Lordy bless the American Express."

"And my job." She smiles and he winces.

"Oh, Ollie, _dear_."

"I was so d.a.m.n silly," says Oliver m.u.f.fledly.

"Both of us. But now it doesn't matter. And we're both of us going to work and be very efficient at it--only now we'll have time and together and Paris to do all the things we really wanted to do. You _are_ going to be a great novelist, Oliver, you know--"

"Well, you're going to be the foremost etcher--or etcheress--since Whistler--there. But, oh, Nancy, I don't care if I write great novels--or any novels--or anything else--just now."

She mocks him pleasantly. "Why, Ollie, Ollie, Your Art?"

"Oh, _d.a.m.n_ my art--I mean--well, I don't quite mean that. But this is life."

"Just as large and twice as natural," says Nancy quoting, but for once Oliver is too interested with living to be literary.

"Life," he says, with an odd shakiness, an odd triumph, "Life," and his arms go round her shoulders.

THE END