“What’s your ring? Oh, it’s lovely! What an enormous diamond! Are diamonds your favourite stones?”
“Yes, I think they are. Ford had several down from Hunt’s for me to choose from. He’s given me a beautiful pendant too, but I shan’t wear that till I’m married.”
She uttered the words most matter-of-factly, and Rose remembered her own brief, delirious engagement to Jim, and the glamour of romance that had surrounded every token of their hastily plighted troth.
“But then,” she reflected, “I was much younger than Diana, and I’d never had a proposal before, and apparently she’s had dozens—God knows why, or what any one can see in her. And she’s known Ford all her life, and I’d only known Jim three weeks, and come to that, I’d have done better never to have set eyes on him—except for my Ces.”
But although her habit of facing facts refused to allow Rose the sentimental luxury of a slurred retrospect, she felt very certain that her short-lived and exceedingly ill-starred love-affair had given her such moments of bliss as Diana, in her decorous betrothal, had never known, and never would know. Diana, however, in place of these, had a number of very substantial satisfactions.
She was much absorbed in her trousseau, a great part of which was being made for her at one of the many charitable institutions in which Lady Aviolet was interested, and she received an enormous number of wedding presents, testifying to her own popularity as well as to the good-will of her friends and relations.
There was also, to occupy her, the question of her new home.
“Naturally, we want to live in the country and to stick to these parts,” said Diana.
“I suppose so.” Rose’s acquiescence was dubious.
“I don’t really think it would be a good plan to start at Squires, do you?”