Cool, wet, windy nights in late summer feel very cold, and a damp
bench under dripping trees was a nuisance to a tired dancing-girl.
Love was so inconvenient that when Kedzie bewailed the restrictions
imposed on unmarried people Gilfoyle proposed marriage. It popped
out of him so suddenly that Kedzie felt his heart stop and listen.
Then it began to race, and hers ran away, too.
"Why, Mr. Gilfoyle! Why, Tommie!" she gurgled. It was her first
proposal of marriage, and she lost her head. "And you a socialist
and telling me you didn't believe in marriages!"
"I don't," said Gilfoyle, with lovely sublimity above petty
consistencies, "except with you, Anita. I don't believe in anything
exclusive for anybody except you for me and me for you. We've just
got to be each other's own, haven't we?"
Kedzie could think of nothing to add except a little emphasis; so
she cried, "Each other's very ownest own!"
Thus they became engaged. That made it possible for her to have him
in her own room at the boarding-house. Also it enabled him to borrow
money from her with propriety when they were hungry for supper.
Fortunately, he did not mind her going on working. Not at all.
Gilfoyle was a fiend of jealousy concerning individuals, but he was
not jealous of the public. It did not hurt him at all to have Kedzie
publishing her structural design to the public, because he loved
the public, and the public paid indirectly. He wanted the masses
to have what the classes have.
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