During the next day, not having the usual phone call from the captain, I decided impulsively that he was avoiding me, having concluded that if I actually married him I might do so from unfair motives. But I could not reconcile these conclusions with his oft-repeated proposals of marriage on any grounds that would please me. "Marry me," he would say, "and I'll make you happy!" I felt that he meant that he would be so generous in his material manifestations of love that I could bring myself to care for him through sheer gratitude.
But my fears were groundless. He phoned the following day and that night took me to the theatre. He asked me again and again to marry him and let him provide for me and for Elizabeth Ann, but I found that I could not even then, after my own careful decision to do just that, tell him that I would marry him. "Well, if you refuse to marry me, I will make a will tomorrow anyway, and leave all I have to Elizabeth Ann when I die. I can at least do that for you," he said, as we sped along back to my hotel in the taxi under the elevated tracks on Columbus Avenue. This to me was the acme of generosity and touched me very deeply, though I didn't let him know it. I told him, half-jestingly, that I would certainly go on a search the following day for an engagement ring of my liking! To this he also heartily agreed.
But the following day, after I had actually selected the ring I thought would look well with the ring my beloved Warren had given me and which I meant to keep always on my engagement finger, the captain met me and said he had been unable to convert into cash some stocks which he owned and requested that I wait a while before deciding upon a ring. I felt sorry, though slightly provoked that he should act this way—first to convey the impression that money meant nothing to him, and then to refuse to buy an engagement ring for the woman he seemed to want so badly for his wife. But I decided he must be "trying me out," and I determined I would prove to him that I didn't have to have the ring in order to marry him. Elizabeth Ann was my sole motive and purpose.
