"Lauderdale isn't Barkis," she temporized. "Have you known me four weeks, or five?"
"So romance perishes, as the lady grows arithmetical! Love can't be weighed on the iceman's scales."
"Nor can mental dynamite blast it out, Mr. Miner. Modern marriage isn't a thing to venture lightly. Love's blindness was once thought a blessing----"
"To-day's surgery is curing the blindness. It's all right to mate as birds do, if people could part as easily. But when a heart must be pledged, not only to honeymoon days, but to the petty irks, and the tedious astronomical study of the skyhigh cost of living----It needs reflection."
"You might give me a croûton of comfort. The especial heart I sit beside isn't pledged elsewhere, I hope?"
"It is," the lips pursed grimly. "It's pledged, alas, to the Uplift of the Underdog, the Castigation of the Capitalist Canine, the Manufacture of the Millennium, the Fashioning of the Future's Fascinating Feminism----"
"Enough, enough! But to no single heart," in pleading insistence.
"Nor to no married one neither," she laughed.
"Content, i' faith! Now you may go home to single blessedness and that supper you thoughtlessly promised to grace." But Pelham wondered, more than once, whether the girl's last light retort had hidden a dig at his friendship with Dorothy. Well, Jane had said less than he deserved, at that.
The convention came closer and closer; and still Paul had not had time to prepare the speech, when the son made his requests. The work at the third ramp, and the planning of an opening on the newly purchased crests beyond, kept Pelham's hands exceptionally busy, so that he did not find much time to wonder at his failure to see the expected address.
Three days before the convention, Jane met him with a worried face. "Something's rotten in the environs of the iron Copenhagen, Pelham. I learned about it from comrade Hernandez. One of the few socialist delegates, a Birrell-Florence miner named Jensen--I don't think you've met him--has been offered a direct bribe to oppose the mining bill. Somebody's busy, that's sure."
"That does sound discouraging. Let's go over your mining reports, so that I can get the facts straight. I ought to understand the situation, at least."