Irrationally in love as she was, with Love, she knew only that he was asking something of her—that she had at last an outlet for that which no one had ever yet desired.
Unable to speak, and unconscious of bathos, she vehemently nodded her head.
Noel immediately took both her hands and shook them wildly up and down.
"Thank Heaven, it's over," he cried boyishly. "You can't imagine how I've been funking asking you—I thought you'd say yes, but one feels such an awful fool—and I've never done it before. I say, Alex—I can call you Alex now, can't I—you're like me, aren't you? You don't want sentimentality. If there's one thing I bar," said the newly-accepted lover, "it's sentimentality."
XI
Engagement of Marriage
"I am engaged to be married," Alex repeated to herself, in a vain endeavour to realize the height to which she must have now attained. But that realization, by which she meant tangible certainty, for which she craved, continually eluded her.
The preliminary formalities, indeed, duly took place, from her own avowal before a graciously-maternal Lady Isabel, to Noel's formal interview with Sir Francis in the traditional setting of the library.
After that, however, a freakish fate seemed to take control of all the circumstances connected with Alex' engagement.