"That Fay's concession of herself was not more abandoned than an assent I came to see through the window which an intimate household, unused to secreting its intimacies except by way of good breeding, almost forces upon the privileged third person. It didn't vividly strike one, as such a fact vividly should, that Fay was in love with her _fiancé_; not, I mean, that admirable sort of "in love" of young people, however undemonstrative, which makes the third person, on leaving its happy presence, want to clutch at the heart of the first pretty woman he sees so that he too can share of the beauty of a beautiful world.... But the opposite, the flatness of a forced emotion, certainly didn't strike me; love was there, I suppose, but of that pale kind which so often doesn't outlast, even in the purest mind, its consequence of marriage. The third person didn't have the acute feeling that he had blundered, ever so little, on them in a room; or that, once there, he should quickly leave them. There was a "grown-up" atmosphere about her in Vitiali's presence which, I once realised, was quite lacking when he wasn't there; which was terribly seldom.... Of course, when I did come on them together, as happened sometimes when I called in the afternoon and Mrs. Richmond was 'lying down,' I generally found a way to retire quite early--but entirely because of that other party to the approaching marriage, the charming Vitiali, whose eyes made no secret of a fact which, after all, there's no reason to conceal from a celibate woman. "I had nothing from Fay about the preliminaries, as I came to be curious about them. She never spoke of yesterday, very seldom of to-morrow; all her words and laughter were for the present moment, when you were with her and were held captive by the deliciously sincere brown eyes, which could mock so faintly--and, if she chose to play with you, act so plaintively! Perhaps it is because I, even then, had put her on a velvet cushion in a glass case, to admire and enjoy her especially, but she certainly did seem a figure quite apart from her own generation of just-emerged _débutantes_--usually a tiresome barley-water stage for a girl, when she hasn't yet quite dropped her girlish giggle for her woman's smile. I never thought of her in relation to the other maidenly things one met in drawing-rooms round about, even when she was herself there as one of them, and by a quaint mixture of shyness and self-possession made one mentally describe her by an unusual epithet for a girl--she looked gracious! But then that was suitable, for parties and such-like were different to these nowadays. It was much less difficult then than it is now to tell a lady from a _demi-mondaine_; girls hadn't yet learnt, or pretended they hadn't, to be sophisticated before getting married. One played more ping-pong in those days.