How he loved to do any sort of thing with Clara! Shopping with her was a rare, epicurean dream. In every store where she had ever traded she was whispered about as the beautiful Mrs. Page.
"I'll bet she won't stay single long."
"Well, don't scream it out. She ain't lookin' for no advice."
"Ain't she beautiful!"
(Enter a floor-walker--silence till he moves forward, smirking.) "Society person, ain't she?"
"Yeah, but poor now, I guess; so they say."
"Gee! girls, ain't she some kid!"
And Clara beamed on all alike. Amory believed that tradespeople gave her discounts, sometimes to her knowledge and sometimes without it. He knew she dressed very well, had always the best of everything in the house, and was inevitably waited upon by the head floor-walker at the very least.
Sometimes they would go to church together on Sunday and he would walk beside her and revel in her cheeks moist from the soft water in the new air. She was very devout, always had been, and God knows what heights she attained and what strength she drew down to herself when she knelt and bent her golden hair into the stained-glass light.
"St. Cecelia," he cried aloud one day, quite involuntarily, and the people turned and peered, and the priest paused in his sermon and Clara and Amory turned to fiery red.
That was the last Sunday they had, for he spoiled it all that night. He couldn't help it.
They were walking through the March twilight where it was as warm as June, and the joy of youth filled his soul so that he felt he must speak.
"I think," he said and his voice trembled, "that if I lost faith in you I'd lose faith in God."
She looked at him with such a startled face that he asked her the matter.
"Nothing," she said slowly, "only this: five men have said that to me before, and it frightens me."
"Oh, Clara, is that your fate!"
She did not answer.
"I suppose love to you is--" he began.
She turned like a flash.
"I have never been in love."
They walked along, and he realized slowly how much she had told him... never in love.... She seemed suddenly a daughter of light alone. His entity dropped out of her plane and he longed only to touch her dress with almost the realization that Joseph must have had of Mary's eternal significance. But quite mechanically he heard himself saying: "And I love you--any latent greatness that I've got is... oh, I can't talk, but Clara, if I come back in two years in a position to marry you--"