She and Ariadne were the two belles of the Ball in the Parish Room on Monday evening. They both danced with the Squire, who said he was in luck to get two literary ladies to dance with him on the same night. But Ariadne walked home with him, and I went with Christina. Mr. Rochester had one of his own roses Ariadne had given him back, in his button-hole. She is so unhappy about Simon that she doesn't care who proposes to her. That is the way girls take it--a very selfish way, but they are selfish all through when they are in love. Ariadne actually thinks the Squire thinks he proposed to her going home that night. I don't. It was pitch dark as we went home, the village is not lighted, and it is a very wicked village. She says, long arms like tentacles came groping out from the wall in the dark, and the Squire dragged her past them. As the village young men couldn't see, they thought her one of their own sweethearts, for by then the party had broken up and was all over the place. The chucker-out had been very much occupied and had found the brook near the school-house door very handy. But I don't myself think the Squire did propose. He offered to take care of her, past the tentacles, but not for life. I think if a girl is always dreading proposals and thinking of how men will feel it when refused, proposals never come to them. That is what Christina said, and that Peter Ball took her entirely by surprise, when he asked her. I knew better, for I had chaperoned that affair. She says Peter wears very well, and that there's some gilt left on the gingerbread still. The gramophone is still in all its glory, and when she was ill up-stairs, when Jim was born, Peter used to send up a message by the nurse for her to leave the door of her room open for half-an-hour before dinner, and then she would hear it. The nurse always forbade it, but Christina always insisted on it, to please Peter, and lay with her ears stopped up with sheet till the half hour was over. It is a new gramophone, not the one he had in Leinster Gardens. That shouted itself out, I suppose? Christina found an entry in his old pocket-book-- _"July 19--a memorable year in my life. I bought a new gramophone and I got married. I won't say anything about my wife here, but the gramophone was a beauty when she was new----"_ Ariadne was disgusted. She doesn't believe Simon would say such a coarse thing. Well, I wish she had some experience on the subject, what Simon would say, that's all!