for such a ceremony were the most
preposterous absurdity in the world, she had leaned suddenly close to
him and left upon his cheek the veriest feather from a fairy's wing.

She wrote him a month later:

No. It must keep on being almost.

Isn't almost pretty pleasant? You know well enough that I care for you.
I did from the first minute I saw you, and I'm pretty sure you
knew it--I'm afraid you did. I'm afraid you always knew it. I'm not
conventional and cautious about being engaged, as you say I am, dear. (I
always read over the "dears" in your letters a time or two, as you say
you do in mine--only I read all of your letters a time or two!) But
it's such a solemn thing it scares me. It means a good deal to a lot
of people besides you and me, and that scares me, too. You write that I
take your feeling for me "too lightly" and that I "take the whole affair
too lightly." Isn't that odd! Because to myself I seem to take it
as something so much more solemn than you do. I shouldn't be a bit
surprised to find myself an old lady, some day, still thinking of
you--while you'd be away and away with somebody else perhaps, and me
forgotten ages ago! "Lucy Morgan," you'd say, when you saw my obituary.
"Lucy Morgan? Let me see: I seem to remember the name. Didn't I know
some Lucy Morgan or other, once upon a time?" Then you'd shake your
big white head and stroke your long white beard--you'd have such a
distinguished long white beard! and you'd say, 'No. I don't seem to
remember any Lucy Morgan; I wonder what made me think I did?' And poor
me! I'd be deep in the ground, wondering if you'd heard about it and
what you were saying! Good-bye for to-day. Don't work too hard--dear!

George immediately seized pen and paper, plaintively but vigorously
requesting Lucy not to imagine him with a beard, distinguished or
otherwise, even in the extremities of age. Then, after inscribing his
protest in the matter of this visioned beard, he concluded his missive
in a tone mollified to tenderness, and proceeded to read a letter from
his mother which had reached him simultaneously with Lucy's. Isabel
wrote from Asheville, where she had just arrived with her husband.

I think your father looks better already, darling, though we've been
here only a few hours It may be we've found just the place to build him
up. The doctors said they hoped it would prove to be, and if it is, it
would be worth the long struggle we had with him to get him to give up
a