Made to Measure, William Campbell Gault [free books to read TXT] 📗

the left side for matching sizes.

The matron recognized him and said, "Mr. Tullgren has gone home for the day. Is there anything I can do?"

He told her what he wanted and she thumbed through a register.

"Yes, she's still here," the matron said finally. "She's refused exactly thirty-two offers up to yesterday. You were thinking of a—reconciliation?"

Joe nodded with a new humility. "If she'll have me."

The matron smiled. "I think she will. Women are more understanding than men, usually. More romantic, you might say."

Nine-tenths of the building was brightly lighted, one-tenth rather dim. In the dim tenth were the post-intent rooms, the reconciliation chambers.

Joe sat on a yellow love-seat in one of the empty reconciliation chambers, leafing through, but not seeing, a copy of a fashion magazine. Then there were steps in the hall, familiar steps, and he smelled the perfume before she came in.

She stood timidly at the archway, but Joe was even more unsure and weak in the legs and he had trouble with his breathing.

"Joe," Vera said.

"Vera," he answered.

It wasn't much, but it seemed to be what both had in mind.

"Was there something you wanted to tell me?" she asked. "Something important?"

"It's important to me, Vera," he said humbly. "I hope it's just as important to you."

She looked brightly at him.

"I find it very difficult to put into words," he stumbled. "The usual expressions of this emotion are so hackneyed. I would like to find some other way to say it."

"Say what?"

"That I love you."

She ran to him. The impact knocked the breath out of both of them, but neither noticed.

"Isn't the old phrase good enough, silly?" she scolded and kissed him. "I love you too, lover baby."

Behind them, at the key words, the sonic-signal closed the hidden doors in the archway and they were alone in the reconciliation chamber.

Joe discovered that Sam Tullgren, Director of the Domestic Center, had thought of everything to make reconciliations complete.

End of Project Gutenberg's Made to Measure, by William Campbell Gault