Lily stifled at birth a rebellious fancy that she might have preferred less formality and more impetuosity from her lover.
Her upbringing, assigning to parents a right little less than divine over their children, and her sense that Nicholas scarcely belonged to her own generation, alike enabled her to view his method of procedure as the desirable outcome of his scrupulous chivalry.
She played for a little while with fancies that she herself qualified as childish, concerning a diamond ring, the excitement of telling the Hardinges that she was engaged, and the glory of being married at twenty.
Mrs. Aubray—she would be Mrs. Aubray!
Lily Aubray.
She wrote it down and looked at it, feeling more than ever like the heroine of a novel. Then Lily suddenly told herself that it was her duty to face this question—and again had to stifle an unwelcome idea that the time for facing it had already passed when she had first suggested to her father the visit of Nicholas Aubray. It was extraordinary, the difficulty of facing the question.
Her mind kept wandering to trivial considerations, and she rehearsed to herself the imaginary speeches that Nicholas might make. She could not focus her thoughts at all to the point of supplying her own answers.
"But I must know whether I mean to accept or to refuse him!" Lily expostulated with herself.
She remembered the accepted convention that no woman need allow a man to offer her marriage in so many words if she intends to humiliate him by a refusal.
"A nice girl can always stave off the actual proposal, and make the man understand that it's no use," Dorothy Hardinge had once seriously informed her.