"Our friends in the library seem to think that you and I could get along together, and I'm disposed to think they're right—aren't you?"
In my ignorance and helplessness, and with the consciousness of what I was expected to do, I merely looked at him without speaking.
Then he fixed his monocle afresh, and, looking back at me in a curious way, he said:
"I don't think I should bore you, my dear. In fact, I should be rather proud of having a good-looking woman for my wife, and I fancy I could give you a good time. In any case"—this with a certain condescension—"my name might be of some use to you."
A sort of shame was creeping over me. The dog was yawning in my face. My intended husband threw it off his knee.
"Shall we consider it a settled thing, then?" he asked, and when in my confusion I still made no reply (having nothing which I felt myself entitled to say), he said something about Aunt Bridget and what she had told him at luncheon about my silence and shyness, and then rising to his feet he put my arm through his own, and turned our faces towards home.
That was all. As I am a truthful woman, that was everything. Not a word from me, nay, not half a word, merely a passive act of silent acquiescence, and in my youthful and almost criminal innocence I was committed to the most momentous incident of my life.
But if there was no love-making, no fondling, no kissing, no courtship of any kind, and none of the delirious rapture which used to be described in Alma's novels, I was really grateful for that, and immensely relieved to find that matters could he completed without them.
When we reached the house, the bell was ringing for tea and my father was coming out of the library, followed by the lawyers.
"So that's all right, gentlemen?" he was saying.