Mother and father are delighted at my engagement; but their surprise is rather humiliating, it does make me realise how awfully plain and dull I am.
I haven't any parlour tricks or conversation, my tennis is rotten, I'm sick on the yacht, I swim like a mechanical toy, I haven't the foggiest idea how to play golf, and I'm never sure of my twinkle in jazzing—and Grace Gilpin does all these things absolutely toppingly. She's been trained to do them from quite a little kid.
We seem to do everything in fours—I and Cheneston, and Grace Gilpin and a man called Markham, Walter Markham, who adores her.
Cheneston is sweet to me when we're all together, but when he and I leave the others and are alone sometimes he hardly speaks.
I imagine he is bored.
I do love him so much, every day I seem to love him more and more and more.
I suppose I ought to be ashamed and humiliated to write that down, because I simply bore him to tears; but I'm not, mine isn't a silly love—he's my very, very dear, the most wonderful man I have ever seen or known.
Sometimes people say things that simply wring my heart.
"I suppose you'll get married directly after the war?" the C.O.'s wife said. "Will you live in England?"
"I—I don't know," I answered.