and you're fulfilling your economic place in the nation. Don't you
forget it, either."

That had comforted her. She had determined then never to marry but
to hang around, as he suggested, for the rest of her life. She was
quite earnest about it, and resolved.

She picked up the blue dress and standing before her mirror, held
it up before her. It looked rather shabby, she thought, but the
theater was not like a dance, and anyhow it would look better at
night. She had been thinking about next Wednesday evening ever
since Dick Livingstone had gone. It seemed, better somehow,
frightfully important. It was frightfully important. For the first
time she acknowledged to herself that she had been fond of him, as
she put it, for a long time. She had an odd sense, too, of being
young and immature, and as though he had stooped to her from some
height: such as thirty-two years and being in the war, and having
to decide about life and death, and so on.

She hoped he did not think she was only a child.

She heard Nina coming up the stairs. At the click of her high heels
on the hard wood she placed the dress on the bed again, and went to
the window. Her father was on the path below, clearly headed for a
walk. She knew then that Nina had been asking for something.

Nina came in and closed the door. She was smaller than Elizabeth
and very pretty. Her eyebrows had been drawn to a tidy line, and
from the top of her shining head to her brown suede pumps she was
exquisite with the hours of careful tending and careful dressing