Mary allowed Daisy's character to be sacrificed in order to divert her grandmother from the discussion of Mr. Alison. Soon she was able to propose bed and was glad when at last she found herself alone in the dark with her secret. Her first proposal.... Only that afternoon she had been wondering if any one would propose to her, and already on her twentieth birthday she had received one. Jemmie.... But she did not think of him as Jemmie. Were she to become his wife to-morrow, she should for a long time think of him as Mr. Alison. Mary Alison.... That was rather attractive. Mrs. Alison.... It was in his favor that he had neither father nor mother alive. If she did make up her mind to marry him, she should not want another grandmamma in her mother-in-law. Mary Alison ... yours most truly, Mary Alison.... But marriage meant more than that. Rather horrid intimacies ... children.... "Do I want children?" Mary asked herself. "I don't believe I do at all." Pain! And of course, unless she had been utterly misinformed, it must hurt horribly. "I should never have the courage," she told herself. "Never," she decided, and turning over she was soon fast asleep. A week later, Daisy Harland did come to London, and to her in that top room of the Harlands' house in South Kensington, in that room papered with hunting scenes, which was bound up more closely with her girlhood than any room in the world, Mary confided the tale of her first proposal. "He's not so bad," Daisy commented. "He's clean to look at. Pretty well off too, I should say. But why be in a hurry?" "Oh, I'm not in any hurry. It's my grandmother who is so anxious to see me safely married." "I wonder why. I suppose she can't bear the idea of not arranging the whole matter to please herself." Mary gazed down at the garden of the Square, in which little girls well wrapped up in white furs were running about after large particolored balls of india rubber, while their nurses gossiped gravely with one another, moving with slow and stately tread behind their perambulators. What fun she and Daisy had always had in the Square when she used to stay with her friend for the holidays! Perhaps it was the bareness of winter that made it seem so small nowadays; or perhaps everything shrank as one grew older. "Don't you think that a girl ought to love the man she is going to marry?" Mary pressed. "But what is love? Personally I've never been in love." "Daisy! You were tremendously in love with Gerald Ashworth. Don't you remember when you bought that lilac notepaper with two hearts stamped in the top corner?" Her friend laughed. "You don't think seriously that the kind of silliness in which one indulges at fifteen is to be considered an experience?" "Yes, I do," Mary insisted. "If I hadn't been in love when I was small, I shouldn't be bothering now about being in love with Jemmie Alison. I shouldn't expect anything. As it is, I feel somehow that I want more than he can give me."