And now Bridie met the plane whenever asked. It cut fearfully into her busy day. No one quite knew why she did it. Bridie knew, and perhaps Thor Storm. He once said to her, “It’s because of the way you came to Alaska that day, isn’t it, Bridie?”

“I guess so,” she admitted, and closed her eyes for a moment as she remembered the girl in the picture hat and the long sweeping skirt who had clambered up the beach in response to a cruel joke. “Maybe so. I want them to feel they’re doing something serious. And for life. Not just flying up here in a plane, like for a college stunt or something. I can’t make out whether they’re younger than brides used to be or I’m just getting older. Little of both, maybe. In crazy times, like now, people always seem to get married younger. War times, and after wars, when folks are scared and nervous. They want company, I suppose, and can you blame them! Somebody they can hang on to, and talk to, and love. And be loved by.”

The thing grew so that it became one of her many projects and, urged by Thor Storm and the Barnetts, the town finally voted her a tiny salary for the work. Most of this dribbled away to the young couples, though they scarcely noticed it. A wedding cake bought by Bridie at the Sweet Tooth Bakery; a bunch of somewhat frost-shocked flowers for the altar; a prayer book for the girl; a festive boutonniere for the bashful bridegroom.

Now she had an impromptu sort of office in a remote corner of the Ice Palace lobby. No one quite knew how she had come by it. Even the superintendent was mystified, and it was known that Czar Kennedy had refrained from ousting her only because Bridie’s position in the town’s affection had somehow mysteriously become more solidly established than his own.

In the beginning he had demanded of the Ice Palace staff, then of the tenants, and finally of the City Council, “What’s she doing there? Running a soup kitchen or a First Aid to the Lovelorn or something! Next thing they’ll be sleeping in the lobby and the Ice Palace will be a flophouse. I want her out of there.”

But she stayed. Her desk was a ramshackle affair salvaged when the Miners’ National Bank next door went in for modern decoration. Daily Bridie sat at this desk for hours, while over its time-scarred top passed such tales of romance, failure, nostalgia, love unrequited, love fulfilled, hopes, despair, as would have staggered any recipient less sturdy than Bridie. Aside from a disorderly clutter of papers, pamphlets, scribbled notes, plane-and-railroad timetables, the desk’s surface was likely to hold a vase of drooping flowers or a brown-edged corsage bouquet left over from last night’s club dinner; a chocolate cake contributed by a women’s-club cake sale; a pair of hand-sewn mukluks, palpably an offering (she wouldn’t have worn them caught in a ten-foot blizzard on a mountaintop); half a cup of cold gray tea; newspaper clippings; a photograph of the latest Air Force bride and bridegroom. That same photograph—at least, it looked the same, though the boy and girl were always a different boy and girl—was tacked or taped all over the walls of the cluttered corner.