ng 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.

He kept as far as he was able his compact of expecting nothing of her,
except of course that he couldn't avoid expecting that their arrangement
would lead in the natural course to marriage. She had met him more than
halfway in that, agreeing to an earlier date than he had thought
compatible with the ritual of engagements in the Best Society. She had
managed, however, that Peter should present her with her summer freedom:
the engagement was not even to be announced until their return to town.
And in the meantime Peter was to find a house. He had offered her travel
for t