It was all a revelation to him.  It was, moreover, delightful to be told by Pauline how wonderful she found all these things in him, and how unexpected.  This, she explained, was nothing personal.  “But I often wondered if I should ever meet a man like you.”

“Darling,” he answered humbly, “I don’t think I am that sort of man; really, I’m awfully and frightfully ordinary.”

Then Pauline, to prove the contrary, would ask him if he didn’t feel this or that or the other?  And of course he could truthfully say he did, because he felt all and everything Pauline wished him to feel, with her beautiful eyes fixed upon him and the flush of enthusiasm on her cheeks.  Here was something to inspire a man, this splendidly generous, magnanimous creature.  Of course he had always felt all these things; he had been groping after goodness.  It was the goodness in Diana, and he was kind enough to say in the professional aunt, which had appealed to him.  He had been feeling after, it for years, but it was only Pauline who had revealed it to him, in himself.  Well, he was very much in love.  Most men engaged to charming girls feel their own unworthiness, and the girl is sweetly content that they should do so.  Not so Pauline.  She revealed to her astonished lover a depth of goodness in his character that he had least suspected, and he gradually began to feel how little he had been understood.

Now this is an excellent basis on which to start an engagement.  I forget exactly how and when they became engaged, but it was certainly before Dick said humbly, “Darling, I don’t think I am that sort of man; really, I’m awfully and frightfully ordinary,” because, with all Pauline’s kindness to sinners, there was none hardened enough to address her as “darling” without being first engaged to her; so by that I know they were engaged that evening at the opera, because it was in a Wagnerian pause that Dick said those words, in a loud voice from the back of the box.  How else should a professional aunt know these things?

Between meeting Dick and becoming engaged to him, Pauline went home and came back with a larger box and stayed quite a long time, as time goes, although, as a time in which to become engaged, it was very short, and Nannie, feeling this, asked Pauline if she knew much about Mr. Dudley, and was she wise?  In spite of this anxiety on Nannie’s part, she enjoyed it all immensely, and wept to her heart’s content when the engagement was announced.  Now Dick Dudley was a rich young man, and I wondered whether other people wept too from motives less pure and simple than Nannie’s.

Pauline wanted me to join a society called “The Deaf Dog Society.”  The obligation enforced on members was that they should kneel down, put their arms round the neck of any deaf dog they should chance to meet, and say, “Darling, I love you.”

“You see,” she said, “a deaf dog doesn’t know he is deaf, he only wonders why no one ever speaks to him, why no one ever calls him.  So you see what a splendid society it is, and there is no subscription.”