It seems rather strange, doesn't it, MARJORIE, that after being so wonderfully sensible all the season, I should suddenly do something quite idiotic in September? However, I _have_; and I want you to help me out of it. I'll tell you _all_, if you'll promise not to laugh. When I first came, I was "thrown," as people say, a good deal with the TAYMER'S nephew--ORIEL CRAMPTON who has just left Oxford. I was told he was very serious, rather shy, philanthropic, and has "views"; also that he had done a great deal of good in the West End. This interested me, and I tried to draw him out. They had omitted to mention that he was dreadfully susceptible. We talked for _hours_ in the garden, nearly all the time--at first--about the housing of the rich and horrible cases of over-crowding--at London parties. He was very earnest and ascetic (he never drinks anything but hot water, and doesn't smoke); he lent me books--he is rather handsome--and--gradually--somehow I found I had drifted into an absurd sort of private half-engagement! Yes--I have actually a bangle _rivetted on_--with a date inside--the date I was insane enough to agree----Isn't it dreadful? ORIEL will be well off, but he intends to spend all his money on founding model slums, where the people are to be teetotallers and do bootmaking or something, and be a happy little colony. ORIEL'S views may necessitate his doing a little cobbling himself--just to set an example. I was enormously impressed by this at first; but I am afraid I have become frivolous again. Some other people have come here, including a nice boy they call BABY BEAUMONT. He is really almost nineteen, but wonderfully well preserved, very clever, and so cynical that he is quite an optimist. Almost directly, he asked me how long I had known ORIEL CRAMPTON. I said about a fortnight. "Ah! then you must be engaged to him. Poor old ORIEL! He's really quite extraordinarily old-fashioned." "How old is he?" I asked, in faltering tones. "He has rather a way of pretending to be young, I fancy. But he must be four-and-twenty if he is a day. You need not say I told you." It's evidently the fashion to be _very young_--for men, at least. Sometimes I wish it were the fashion to be old enough to know better. If ORIEL really _has_ been engaged before, and may be again, and if getting engaged to people is only a sort of habit of his, perhaps he would not mind so very much if I were to break it off. BABY BEAUMONT is (he says himself) "frankly Pagan." He thinks ORIEL too serious for me, and advises me to marry at leisure, as I am quite sure, anyhow, to repent in haste. He wanted to send a paragraph to the _Post_ to say "A marriage has been arranged, and will shortly be broken off, between Mr. ORIEL CRAMPTON and Miss GLADYS MAYFIELD, younger daughter," and so on.