He was threatened with vertigo but he mastered himself, and drew a long, long breath in farewell to his bachelorhood.
"You have heartened me more than you know," said Mr. Mix, with ecclesiastical soberness. "Because--it has been my poverty--which has kept me silent." He bent forward. "Mirabelle, am _I_ the right man?" Almost by sheer will-power, he rose and came to her, and took her hand. She shrank away, in maiden modesty, but her fingers remained quiescent. Mr. Mix sneezed again, and stooped to kiss her cheek, but Mirabelle avoided him.
"No," she said, with a short laugh. "That don't signify--I don't approve of it much." She wavered, and relented. "Still, I guess it's customary--Theodore."
Before he left her, they had staged their first altercation--it could hardly be called a quarrel, because it was too one-sided. Mirabelle had asked him without the slightest trace of shyness, to telephone the glad tidings to the _Herald_; and of a sudden, Mr. Mix was afflicted with self-consciousness. Unfortunately, he couldn't give a valid reason for it; he couldn't tell her that illogically, but instinctively, he wanted to keep the matter as a locked secret--and especially to keep it locked from Henry Devereux--until the minister had said: Amen. He admitted to himself that this was probably a foolish whim, a needless precaution, but nevertheless it obsessed him, so that he tried to argue Mirabelle away from the _Herald_. His most cogent argument was that the announcement might weaken their position in the League--the League might be too much interested in watching the romance to pay strict attention to reform.
"Humph!" said Mirabelle. "_I_'m not ashamed of being congratulated. Are you? But if you're so finicky about it, I'll do the telephoning myself."
Whereupon Mr. Mix went back to his room, and drank two highballs, and communed with himself until long past midnight.
In the morning, with emotions which puzzled him, he turned to the society column of the _Herald_; and when he saw the flattering paragraph in type,--with the veiled hint that he might be the next candidate for Mayor, on a reform ticket--he sat very still for a moment or two, while his hand shook slightly. No backward step, now! His head was in the noose. He wondered, with a fresh burst of self-effacement, what people would say about it. One thing--they wouldn't accuse him of the truth. Nobody but Mr. Mix himself knew the whole truth--unless perhaps it were Henry Devereux. Henry had developed a knowing eye. But Henry didn't count--Henry was beaten already. Still, if Henry should actually come out and accuse Mr. Mix of--why, what _could_ Henry accuse him of? Simply marrying for money? If it didn't make any difference to Mirabelle, it certainly didn't to Mr. Mix. And what booted the rest of the world? Why should he concern himself with all the petty spite and gossip of a town which wasn't even progressive enough to have an art museum or a flying field, to say nothing of a good fight-club? Let 'em gossip.... But just the same, he wished that Mirabelle had been willing to keep the engagement a secret. Mr. Mix was sure to encounter Henry, once in a while, at the Citizens Club, and he didn't like to visualize Henry's smile.