"Cousin David," she said, "shortly before grandpapa died, I was engaged to Rupert Rivers for a fortnight. At the end of that time I loathed my own body. Young as I was, and scornfully opposed by my mother, I took matters into my own hands, and broke off the engagement."
David looked perplexed.
"It should not have had that effect upon you," he said, slowly. "I don't know much about it, but it seems to me that a man's love and worship should tend to make a woman reverence her own body, and regard her beauty in a new light, because of his delight in it. I remember—" a sudden flush suffused David's pale cheeks, but he brought forth his reminiscence bravely, for Diana's sake: "I remember kissing Amy's hand the evening before I first went to college, and she wrote and told me that for days afterwards that hand had seemed unlike the other, and whenever she looked at it she remembered that I had kissed it."
Diana's laughter was in her eyes. She did not admit it to her voice. She felt very much older, at that moment, than David Rivers.
"Oh, you dear boy!" she said. "What can you, with your Amy and your Africans, know of such men as Rupert, or the doctor, or even—even the church dignitary? You would love a woman's soul, and cherish her body because it contained it. They make one feel that nothing else matters much, so long as one is beautiful. And after having been looked at by them for a little while, one feels inclined to smash one's mirror."
David lifted quiet eyes to hers. They seemed deep wells of childlike purity; yet there was fire in their calm depths.
"When you are so beautiful," he said, simply, "you can't blame a man for thinking so, when he looks at you."
Diana laughed, blushing. She was surfeited with compliments; yet this of David's, so unpremeditated, so impersonal, pleased her more than any compliment had ever pleased her.
But, in an instant, she was grave again. Momentous issues lay before her. Uncle Falcon had been dead eleven months.