Maggie, not to rouse Barney's suspicions, played her role as well as
he did his own. And most of the other diners, a fraction of the
changing two or three hundred thousand people from the South and West
who choose New York as the best of all summer resorts, gazed upon this
handsome couple with their intricate steps which were timed with such
effortless and enviable accuracy, and excitedly believed that they
were beholding two distinguished specimens of what their home papers
persisted in calling New York's Four Hundred.
Maggie got back to her room with the feeling that she had staved off
Barney and her numerous other dilemmas for the immediate present. Her
chief thought in the many events of the day had been only to escape
her dangers and difficulties for the moment; all the time she had
known that her real thinking, her real decisions, were for a later
time when she was not so driven by the press of unexpected
circumstances. That less stressful time was now beginning.
What was she to do next? What were to be her final decisions? And
what, in all this strange ferment, was likely to germinate as possible
forces against her?
She mulled these things over for several days, during which Dick came
to see her twice, and twice proposed, and was twice put off.
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