"Dearest Lily,
"You will be surprised. I'm engaged!!! Really, I can hardly believe it myself yet, and it's deadly private at present, though why I can't think, but you know what old people are like, taking about being caushus, and waiting and seeing, et cetera. But of course I said I'd have to tell you at once, you having had all the same excitement yourself such a little while ago.
"Well! I'll try and begin at the beginning, and not to be too frightfully excited to write sense. His name is Frank Durand, and he is a soldier, taller than me, thank goodness, though not, I must say, nearly as tall as yours. He is honestly and truly good looking (not just we thinking so, but everybody says so) with brown eyes, rather long eyelashes, and a short moustache, and brown hair, very short and thick. He's got ripping teeth, which makes him look particularly nice when he smiles, which he pretty often does. He is a good deal sunburnt—brown, not red, I am thankful to say. He is twenty-eight, and has done frightfully well in the Army, for his age, though he doesn't seem in the least clever, which is lucky, or I should have been terrified of him.
"The whole story of it was that we met at the County Ball just after your wedding, and he asked me for hundreds of dances, and I must say Mother scolded me like anything afterwards, and very nearly threatened not to take me to London with her at all, but I knew she would, of course, all the time. In fact I'd told him I was going to London next day for a fortnight and told him the name of the hotel and everything. He came and called the very day after we'd arrived, and luckily Mother liked him, and asked him to lunch—this was Friday—and on Sunday we met him in the Park, and I had to pretend I was frightfully surprised. (I wasn't in the least, really, having said in a casual way that Mother loved the Park and I always took her to sit there after Church.)
"On Tuesday I wore my new saxe-blue frock—that I must say Miss Jones has made simply heavenly—and he came to tea, and asked if we'd come to a theatre party that had been got up frightfully hurriedly for the next night. (He told me afterwards he'd got it up on purpose, of course.) There was a man there for Mother, old and rather deadly—and two other men from his regiment, and his sister, rather pretty, but quite old, at least twenty-nine, I should think—and a Miss Ballantyne, who had the most disgustingly lovely hair, real auburn and very curly. You know how impossible it is to get mine to wave, even with tongs! However, I had on my new evening frock that you haven't seen, a really good white satin, with plain pearl trimming, and I didn't look bad.
"We had dinner first at a restaurant, and I was feeling so excited all the time I could hardly speak. I didn't sit next him at dinner, but I did at the theatre, and there was nobody on his other side, because he sat at the end of the row. I can honestly say, Lily, that I didn't hear a single word of the play, though the other people were roaring away like mad, with laughter.
"I simply can't tell you the sort of things he was saying to me the whole time, but of course you can imagine!
"Well, it was raining when we came out, and there was the usual fuss about cabs and things, and Mother keeping on about wanting a four-wheeler, and the other men went away by Tube, and the Ballantyne girl had a tiny sort of broom sent for her and took Phyllis Durand and there was room for one other, and of course it ought to have been Frank, but he found a hansom and said could he take me home in it, and Mother go in the broom?
"Can you imagine Mother allowing such a thing? Of course I felt certain she wouldn't, but I did look at her to give her a hint, and she said yes like a perfect lamb!!
"Well, he did it in the hansom, just as we were turning out of Shaftesbury Avenue into Piccadilly Circus. I was frightfully surprised in a way, because it seemed so frightfully quick, but I was simply frantically happy, and only afraid I should wake up and find it all a dream.