“Mother, what are you talking about?” said Harriet sharply. “She has had no attention.”
“Sometimes,” drawled the old lady in a way she affected when she wished to be exasperating, “sometimes, a little attention is so strong that it counts and sometimes attention is attention when nobody thinks it is.”
“Who is it?” asked Harriet in rather a hard voice. Susan regarded Annie with a bewildered, yet kindly smile. Poor Susan had never regarded the honey pots of life as intended for herself, and thus could feel a kindly interest in their acquisition by others.
“My granddaughter is engaged to be married to Mr. von Rosen,” said the old lady. Then she stirred her coffee assiduously.
Susan rose and kissed Annie. “I hope you will be happy, very happy,” she said in an awed voice. Harriet rose, to follow her sister's example but she looked viciously at her mother.
“He is a good ten years older than Annie,” she said.
“And a good twenty-five younger than you,” said the old lady, and sipped her coffee delicately. “He is just the right age for Annie.”
Harriet kissed Annie, but her lips were cold and Annie wondered. It never occurred to her then, nor later, to imagine that her Aunt Harriet might have had her own dreams which had never entirely ended in rainbow mists. She did not know how hardly dreams die. They are sometimes not entirely stamped out during a long lifetime.
That evening Von Rosen came to call on Annie and she received him alone in the best parlour. She felt embarrassed and shy, but very happy. Her lover brought her an engagement ring, a great pearl, which had been his mother's and put it on her finger, and Annie eyed her finger with a big round gaze like a bird's. Von Rosen laughed at the girl holding up her hand and staring at the beringed finger.
“Don't you like it, dear?” he said.