I am not one of those who fling up their hands in despair and wonder what on earth a sensible girl like So-and-So can see in that fellow she’s going to marry. But even when one admits that the deeps that call to deeps in engaged people are and should be invisible to the rest of the world, it is permissible to parents and guardians to deplore the reciprocity. The deeps are not all: in fact the attraction of the deeps can be the least permanent and admirable element in marriage. I knew enough of Rose’s spirit, her vividness, her dependence upon impulse, her love of life, to realize that she was doomed to spend far too much time alone. Eustace had all the virtues, but he had no imagination. He was also fixed where Rose was fluid. He had his eye on the goal success; whereas all that Rose asked from life was a gay serenity. She was in the habit of watching faces light up at her approach: “People,” you might have written on her tombstone as sufficient epitaph, “were pleased to see her”; and all of that was doomed to pass, not because she would be less liked but because she would not be free: she was to be reincarnated as the property of another, as Mrs. Eustace Holt. Still, there is more than one kind of happiness; there is even, I have observed, a happiness to be derived from misery: all doctors would testify to this; and Rose might find, in her home duties and the practice of wifeliness, a complacency that would take the place of the old radiating freedom. I use the word “might” with emphasis: it is all that is possible to parents and guardians who are threatened with the loss of their treasure and have gloomy prevision. In my case I was truly hoping against hope, because I had had a shock. On one of Eustace’s visits I made a discovery about him which filled me with the darkest forebodings. I had found him one afternoon just before post time seated in the library steaming a stamp off a postcard. Rose, it appears, had had occasion to write a rapid order to some shop and, having no halfpenny stamp (for those were the days before the blessings of peace had sent up the postcard rate), she had characteristically stuck on a twopenny-halfpenny one from a store which I kept for foreign correspondence; and Eustace had been entrusted with the card for the post. But his careful eye had detected the extravagance, and when I came upon him he was removing the twopenny-halfpenny stamp and substituting a halfpenny one from his own pocket. Knowing Rose as I did, I would rather have found him burgling my safe or even kissing one of the maids; for the action argued a passion for thrift which would lead in time to the sternest censure of the unthinking carelessness in money matters and the constant generosities which were among her most striking characteristics.