Rose thought her indeed looking tired and with something less than her usual well-bred security of manner.
“Isn’t all this preliminary fuss rather awful?” she one day abruptly inquired.
“How do you mean, Rose?”
Rose had no aptitude for definitions. “I know I should hate it, that’s all,” she said vaguely. “But I was only engaged a week.”
“But why?” Diana inquired, politely puzzled.
“Oh, it all happened on board ship, and I had a row with the woman I was travelling with, and I didn’t know anybody out there, so Jim just had to fix things up as quickly as he possibly could, and we were married two days after we landed. A woman who’d been on the boat was kind to me, and had me to stay with her till the wedding——”
“But how dreadful for you—and you must have been so very young, too!”
“Seventeen, I was.”
“I’m very glad I wasn’t married at seventeen,” said Diana, with an unaccustomed wistfulness that robbed the words of any offensive intention. “I think one’s so romantic at seventeen, don’t you? I mean, one expects so much.”
“So one ought to, in marriage,” Rose declared stoutly. “I daresay you know that I made rather a hash of things myself, but I do believe one can be most frightfully happy in this world, whatever any one says. It can be more glorious than one’s maddest dreams——”