“Dosia, you don’t know what you are doing. You don’t love George Sutton.”
Dosia’s face took on the well-known obstinate expression.
“He loves me, anyhow, and he is satisfied with me as I am. If he is satisfied, I don’t see why anyone else need object! He likes me just as I am, whether I care for him or not.”
She clasped both hands over her knee as she went on with that unexplainable freakishness to which girlhood is sometimes maddeningly subject, when all feeling as well as reason seems in abeyance, though her voice was tremulous. “And I do care for him. I like him better than anyone I know; we are sympathetic on a great many points. No one—no one has been so kind to me as he! He doesn’t want anything but to make me happy.”
Lois made a gesture of despair. “Oh, kind! As if a man like George Sutton, who has done nothing but have his own way for forty years, is going to give up wanting it now! Marriage is very different from what girls imagine, Dosia.”
“I suppose so,” said Dosia indifferently. She rose and came over to Lois. “Would you like to see my ring?” She turned the circle around on her finger, displaying a diamond like a search-light. “He gave it to me last night.”
“It is very handsome,” said Lois. “I suppose you will have to be thinking of clothes soon,” she added, with a glimmer of the natural feminine interest in all that pertains to a wedding, since further protest seemed futile. “I will write to Aunt Theodosia.”
“Thank you,” said Dosia dutifully.
A hamper of fruit came for her at luncheon, almost unimaginably beautiful in its arrangement of white hothouse grapes and peaches, and strawberries as large as the peaches, and the contents of a box of flowers filled every available vase and jug and bowl in the house, as Dosia arranged them, with the help of Zaidee and Redge—the former winningly helpful, and the latter elfishly agile, his bare knees nut-brown from the sun of the spring-time, jumping on her back whenever she stooped over, to be seized in her arms and hugged when she recovered herself. Flowers and children, children and flowers! Nothing could be sweeter than these.
In the afternoon, in a renewed capacity for social duties, she put on her hat with the roses and went to make a call, long deferred and hitherto impossible of accomplishment, on a certain Mrs. Wayne, a bride of a few months, who, as Alice Torrington, had been one of the girls of her outer circle. Dosia did not mean to announce her engagement, but she felt that Alice Wayne’s state of mind would be more sympathetic, even if unconsciously so, than Lois’.