said.

"It seems too bad, the first time you asked me to do anything," he
muttered over his plate. "I who want so to do things for you."

"Oh, please don't," I said quickly.

He said: "I am afraid you are a little annoyed with me, Beatrice----"

"Indeed I'm not," I protested through all the racket of Vi Vassity's
talk above the pretty flowery table, "only----"

"Only what?"

"Well, I don't think I said you might call me that," I said, colouring.

He lowered his voice and said earnestly: "Are you going to say I may? I
know it's not yet quite a week since I asked you. But couldn't I have my
answer before that? I want so to take you away from all these people."

There was an expression of the most ungrateful disgust on his fair,
Puritan sort of face as he turned it for a moment from me to that of the
bubbling-over music-hall artiste who was his hostess.

"None of these people are fit," he declared resentfully, "to associate
with you."

"You forget that plenty of people might not think I was fit to associate
with! A girl who is arrested for jewel robbery!"

"Your own fault, Miss Lovelace, if I may say so! If you hadn't been here
with Miss Million"--another ungrateful glance--"this suspicion wouldn't
have touched you."

"If I hadn't brought Miss Million here, it wouldn't have touched her!"

"That has nothing to do with it," he said quite fretfully. Men generally
are fretful, I notice, when women score a point in common sense.

It's so unexpected.

"The question still is--Are you going to make me the happiest man in the
world by marrying me?"

It's odd what a difference there is between one's first proposal of
marriage--and one's second!

Yes! Even if they are from the same man, as mine were. The first time is
much the better.

A girl is prouder, more touched by it. She is possessed by the feeling
"Ah, I am really not worth all this! I don't deserve to have a really
splendid young man thinking as much of me as Dick, or Tom, or Harry, or
Reginald, or whoever it is does."

I am only an ordinary sort of girl. I'm not one quarter as pretty, or as
nice, or as sweet-tempered, or as affectionate, or as domesticated, or
as good with my needle, or as likely to make a good wife as thousands of
other girls who would be only too glad to have him!

Yet it's me he chooses. It's me he loves. It's me he called "The One
Girl in the World for Him."

That may be a little obvious, but, oh, how wonderful! Even if a girl