"I guess there can't anything keep us from the best except ourselves," she said. "Being willing to put up with the second best gives us more trouble than the Lord ever meant for us. Think of the way I've always wanted children--but if they'd been my real own, they'd have been sickly, likely, or even lame like me, or just ordinary like the only kind of man who would have married me. As it is, I've had Clarice's and now----" She broke off with a quick, old-maidish colour. Ellen had gone so far as to name all of Peter's children in the days when nothing seemed so unlikely; now in the face of his recent engagement she would have thought it indelicate. "_She_ would have liked you marrying so well, Peter," she finished with a backward motion of her head toward the room where the parlour set, banished long ago from the town house, symbolized for Ellen the brooding maternal presence. "Yes, she would have liked it." There came back to him with deep satisfaction his mother's appraisement of young Mrs. Dassonville, who must, as he recalled her, have been shaped by much the same frame of life as Eunice Goodward--the Lovely Lady. The long unused phrase had risen unconsciously to his lips on the day that he had brought Eunice her ring. He had spent a whole week in the city choosing it; three little flawless, oblong emeralds set with diamonds, almost encircling her finger with the mystic number seven. He had discovered on the day that she had accepted him, that it had to be emeralds to match the green lights that her eyes took on in the glen from the deep fern, the mossy bank and the green boughs overhead. On the terrace at Lessings' under a wide June sky he had supposed them to be blue; but there was no blue stone of that sky colour of sufficient preciousness for Eunice Goodward. She had been very sweet about the ring, touched with grateful surprise for its beauty and its taste. Something he could see of relief, of assurance, flashed and fell between the two women as she showed it to her mother. They had taken him so beautifully on trust, they couldn't have known, he reflected, whether he would rise at all to the delicate, balanced observation of life among them; it was evidence, the emerald circlet, of how satisfyingly he had risen. The look that passed between mother and daughter was like a spark that lighted as it fell, an unsuspected need of him as man merely, the male element, security, dependability, care. His first response to it was that of a swimmer who has struck earth under him; he knew in that flash where he was, by what familiar shores; and the whole effect, in spite of him was of the sudden shrinkage of that lustrous sea in which his soul and sense had floated. It steadied him, but it also for the moment narrowed a little the horizon of adventure. It was the occasion that Eunice took to define for him his status as an engaged man.