Miss Milburn gave a clever imitation of a little scream of horror.
“INDEED I won’t! Lorne, you are never, NEVER to do that! As if we were in a ridiculous English novel!”
“That’s the part of an English novel I always like,” said Lorne. “The going and asking. It must about scare the hero out of a year’s growth; but it’s a glorious thing to do—it would be next day, anyhow.”
“It’s just the sort of thing to please Mother,” Dora meditated, “but she can’t be indulged all the time. No, Lorne, you’ll have to leave it to me—when there’s anything to tell.”
“There’s everything to tell now,” said he, who had indeed nothing to keep back.
“But you know what Mother is, Lorne. Suppose they hadn’t any objection, she would never keep it to herself! She’d want to go announcing it all over the place; she’d think it was the proper thing to do.”
“But, Dora, why not? If you knew how I want to announce it! I should like to publish it in the sunrise—and the wind—so that I couldn’t go out of doors without seeing it myself.”
“I shouldn’t mind having it in Toronto Society, when the time comes. But not yet, Lorne—not for ages. I’m only twenty-two—nobody thinks of settling down nowadays before she’s twenty-five at the very earliest. I don’t know a single girl in this town that has—among my friends, anyway. That’s three years off, and you CAN’T expect me to be engaged for three years.”
“No.” said Lorne, “engaged six months, married the rest of the time. Or the periods might run concurrently if you preferred—I shouldn’t mind.”
“An engaged girl has the very worst time. She gets hardly any attention, and as to dances—well, it’s a good thing for her if the person she’s engaged to CAN dance,” she added, teasingly.