Mary wished that Daisy Harland had come up from the country yesterday instead of waiting until to-night to wish her best friend many happy returns of the day. Daisy's opinion would have been so valuable. Daisy was so advanced, so unconventional, and yet always so right. But then Grandmamma, too, was always right, and Grandmamma had deliberately chosen the dress. Mary gave up bothering about the problem, which was no problem at all really, because she must obviously take Grandmamma's advice as long as Grandmamma was alive to give it. And if Grandmamma should die? Why, then, in this great house she, Mary Flower, should be all alone! No wonder Grandmamma was anxious for her to be safely married. Marriage? That was indeed something to talk about with her friend. If only the frost would hold so that Daisy might be resigned to stay in London for a while and spend hours in discussing marriage. Not of course as the topic had been discussed at school, where nobody knew anything for certain and the horridest girls vied with one another in dreadful propoundings. No, not like that, but seriously, almost religiously--if one could compare two things so far asunder as religion and marriage. Mary contemplated the prospect of marriage with several of the men who visited the house in King's Gate. None of them considered thus made her feel at all anxious to be married; rather did each one present himself to her fancy like an unknown bottle of medicine, the efficacy of which was guaranteed but of the niceness or nastiness of which there was nothing to be learned from its external appearance. It was not that Mary had never imagined herself in love. Like most schoolgirls she had cherished impossible loyalties and sentimental passions; but the figures upon which these had been bestowed were like the figures in a picture book or the remote incarnations that are begotten by music. Love was an aspiration to a life beyond the present, a kind of yearning upon immortality; it was never a practical guide to the humdrum, the yet so intricate humdrum, of existence; it had nothing at all to do with marriage. Lady Flower was responsible for this attitude of her granddaughter. By living so much in Paris, by allowing the French half of her character to recover from years of discouragement by her husband, and by brooding over her son's _mésalliance_--it was typical of the sentimental English that they should have to borrow the right word from France--the old lady felt herself more and more definitely inclined to the _mariage de convenance_. She never let pass an opportunity to impress upon Mary its superiority. "Love, my dear child," she would tell her, "is an invention of the poets to excuse their own weaknesses." This afternoon, as Mary stared out across the wintry park, love did seem a long way off from King's Gate, and marriage, for all it was such a mystery, did seem comparatively near.