Martin as absurdly, willfully freakish, and evening dresses which
seemed deliberately to have been handed over to a cat to be torn to
ribbons, it came back to him that one just such soft spring evening,
the year before, he had walked home from the Grand Central Station
and been seized suddenly with an almost painful longing to be asked
by some precious person who belonged wholly to him to share her
delight in all the things which then stood for nothing in his life.
Then and there he fulfilled an ambition long cherished and hidden
away; he touched Joan on the arm and opened the elaborate door of a
famous jeweler. He was known to the shop from the fact that he and
his father had always dealt there for wedding and Christmas
presents. He was welcomed by a man in the clothes of a concert
singer and with the bedside manner of a family doctor.

He was desperately self-conscious, and his collar felt two sizes too
small, but he managed to get into his voice a tone that was
sufficiently matter-of-fact to blunt the edge of the man's rather
roguish smile. "Let me see your latest gold-mesh bags," he said as
ordinary, everyday people ask to see collar studs.

"Marty!" whispered Joan. "What are you going to do?"

"Oh, that's all right," said Martin. "You can't get along without a
bag, you see."

Half a dozen yellow, insinuating things were laid out on the shining
glass, and with a wonderful smile that was worth all the gold the
earth contained to Martin, Joan made a choice--but not hastily, and
not before she had inspected every other gold bag in the shop. Even
at eighteen she was woman enough to want to be quite certain that