Her eyes were like stars.
He burst out boyishly: "If I only had more time! If only I could have met
you even when I first came to San Francisco...before...before...I'd--I'd
like to marry you. It's fearfully soon to say such a thing. I feel like a
fool. But I'm not the first man to fall madly in love at first sight...and
you...you...If I tell you now instead of waiting it's because there's so
little time. Would you...do you think you could marry me?"
"Oh! Ah!" (She almost said Ow.) After all it was her first proposal. She
was thrilled in spite of the fact that she was in love with another man,
for she felt close to something elemental, hazily understood...something
in her own unsounded depths rushed to meet it.
But he was too young, and too "easy," and she didn't like his gray flannel
shirt; which, laundry being out of the question, he had bought in Fillmore
Street almost opposite the undertaker's.
"Suppose we correspond for a year? That is, if you must really go so soon."
"I must. I want you to go with me."
His eyes had turned almost black and he had set his jaw in a way she didn't
like at all. In nerving himself to go through the ordeal he had worked up
his fermenting mind into a positively brutal mood.
"Oh--mercy! I couldn't do that. My people are the most conventional in the
world."
The situation was getting beyond her. She had not intended to make him
propose for at least a week and then he would have been abject and she
majestic.
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