The next few days were taken up with the embarrassed
adjustment of their new relation to Mr. Ramy and to each other.
Ann Eliza's ardour carried her to new heights of self-effacement,
and she invented late duties in the shop in order to leave Evelina
and her suitor longer alone in the back room. Later on, when she
tried to remember the details of those first days, few came back to
her: she knew only that she got up each morning with the sense of
having to push the leaden hours up the same long steep of pain.

Mr. Ramy came daily now. Every evening he and his betrothed
went out for a stroll around the Square, and when Evelina came in
her cheeks were always pink. "He's kissed her under that tree at
the corner, away from the lamp-post," Ann Eliza said to herself,
with sudden insight into unconjectured things. On Sundays they
usually went for the whole afternoon to the Central Park, and Ann
Eliza, from her seat in the mortal hush of the back room, followed
step by step their long slow beatific walk.

There had been, as yet, no allusion to their marriage, except
that Evelina had once told her sister that Mr. Ramy wished them to
invite Mrs. Hochmuller and Linda to the wedding. The mention of
the laundress raised a half-forgotten fear in Ann Eliza, and she
said in a tone of tentative appeal: "I guess if I was you I
wouldn't want to be very great friends with Mrs. Hochmuller."

Evelina glanced at her compassionately. "I guess if you was
me you'd want to do everything you could to please the man you
loved. It's lucky," she added with glacial irony, "that I'm not
too grand for Herman's friends."