“Oh, are you, darling?” murmured Dora. “Nobody would have guessed it.”
“But I am over things like that, old-fashioned and romantic. I think love in a cottage would be quite ideal, not because a cottage is ideal—I would much sooner not live in one—but because love is. And, oh, Dora, I can just advise you not to marry him unless you are in love with him. I daresay heaps of girls make very nice sensible marriages, where there’s lots of money, and where they each like the other, but you do miss such a lot by not falling in love. You miss—you miss it all.”
Dora scrutinized her friend for a moment, her head a little on one side, with something of the manner of a bright-eyed thrush listening for the movement of the worm that it hopes to breakfast on.
“But there’s something in your mind, which you are not saying, May,” she remarked. “I can hear it rustling.”
“Yes. There are just two little things that make me wonder whether you are in love with him. The first is you said you were sure he was good! That is no reason at all. You don’t fall in love with a person because he’s good. You esteem and like him—or it’s possible to conceive doing so—because he’s good, but you don’t love him for that reason.”
Dora gave a little purr of laughter.
“Oh, May, you are heavenly,” she said. “But surely it’s an advantage if your promesso is good.”
“Oh, certainly, but nobody in love stops to think about that.”
“I see. Well, what is the second thing that makes you wonder?”
May looked at her with her large, serious blue eyes.