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 “Mine won’t. And I care for any man who didn’t fulfil it.”

“What if you never meet him?”

“Then I shall die an old maid,” was the cheerful response. “I daresay it isn’t the hardest death by any means.”

“Oh, I suppose the dying would be easy enough; it’s the living an old maid I shouldn’t like,” said Diana, with no intention of being humorous. “Although I wouldn’t mind being an old maid much if I could be one like Miss Lavendar. But I never could be. When I’m forty-five I’ll be horribly fat. And while there might be some romance about a thin old maid there couldn’t possibly be any about a fat one. Oh, mind you, Nelson Atkins proposed to Ruby Gillis three weeks ago. Ruby told me all about it. She says she never had any intention of taking him, because any one who married him will have to go in with the old folks; but Ruby says that he made such a perfectly beautiful and romantic proposal that it simply swept her off her feet. But she didn’t want to do anything rash so she asked for a week to consider; and two days later she was at a meeting of the Sewing Circle at his mother’s and there was a book called ‘The Complete Guide to Etiquette,’ lying on the parlour table. Ruby said she simply couldn’t describe her feelings when in a section of it headed, ‘The Deportment of Courtship and Marriage,’ she found the very proposal Nelson had made, word for word. She went home and wrote him a perfectly Rh