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Robert.
    He knew he was beautiful, and all the girls knew it. Jenny knew it too. She had loved him for
    four and a half years, almost since the day that the blood that made her a woman first flowed,
    and her mother had explained to her what this meant, and what would happen to her on her
    wedding night. When she had understood, she had blushed fierily, and tried to forget. It had only
    been three days before that she had seen Robert for the first time, and had wondered at her own
    inability to think of anything else since, for such a thing had never happened to her before; boys
    were just boys, and their differences from girls had never been terribly intriguing. It seemed to
    her that her mother had just explained this too, and rather than feeling pleased and excited, she
    felt it was all too much, and was frightened. None of this she told her mother, who might have
    been able to reassure her; and she never told anyone of her feelings for Robert.
    So she knew she loved this young man, but she had never done anything to draw his attention to
    her. But she was now eighteen, and he twenty, and he was beginning to realise that he could not
    go on merely being beautiful at his parents’ expense, and that it was time that he put his beauty
    to what he had always known was its purpose: to find himself a wife who would keep him
    comfortably.
    He had known about Jenny for as long as she had known about him, for it was his habit to ask
    about every girl he saw, and he had asked about her on the very day she had first seen him. But,
    vain as he was, he did not know that she loved him, for she was that clever at hiding it. He found
    her such a dreary, dim little thing that even though he did not forget about her, in the four years
    since he had first been told about her parents’ farm and the fact that she was the only and much
    beloved child, he had not been able to bring himself to flirt with her. There were other, prettier,
    livelier girls that pleased him better. But this year, the year that she was eighteen and he twenty,
    he decided the time had come, and he had steeled himself to do what he had by this time
    convinced himself was his duty; and, looking for her at the harvest fair, had been astonished at
    the change in her, at the sparkle in her eye and the straight, elegant way she carried herself.
    Without inquiring about the source of the change, either to her or to himself, he found that his
    duty was not quite as dreadful as he had expected. He flirted with her and she, hesitantly,
    responded. She had seen him flirt with other girls. And he had to admit, by her response, that she
    might be dim but she was not unintelligent. And so to keep her interest he had to ... put himself
    out a little.
    He came to call on her at her parents’ farm, and was charming to her parents. She had told him
    that she was being sent off to stay a season with her parents’ relatives in the city, and while she
    did not tell him why, he could guess. She told him that they were due to leave in a fortnight’s
    time. The day before they would have left, he asked her to marry him.
    The warmth of her kiss when she answered him yes startled him; and again he thought that
    perhaps doing his duty would not be so dreadful after all, for if she was not as pretty as some,
    still the armful of her was good to hold, and she loved him, of course, as he expected her to.
    She did love him. And she believed that he loved her, for he had told her so. She thought she
    would have known—for such was her acuteness about anything to do with him, and her mother
    had many friends who came joking and gossiping around, and she always listened—if he had
    ever proposed marriage to any of the other girls he had been seen with over the last four years.
    And if he did not love her, why else would he have proposed? For marriage was for life, and a
    husband and wife must come first with each other for all the days of it.
    She knew, for she was not unintelligent, about the