"Being willing to put up with the second best gives us more trouble than the Lord ever meant for us.

Think of the way I've always wanted children--but if they'd been my real own, they'd have been sickly, likely, or even lame like me, or just ordinary like the only kind of man who would have married me.

As it is, I've had Clarice's and now----" She broke off with a quick, old-maidish colour.
Ellen had gone so far as to name all of Peter's children in the days when nothing seemed so unlikely; now in the face of his recent engagement she would have thought it indelicate.
"_She_ would have liked you marrying so well, Peter," she finished with a backward motion of her head toward the room where the parlour set, banished long ago from the town house, symbolized for Ellen the brooding maternal presence.
"Yes, she would have liked it." There came back to him with deep satisfaction his mother's appraisement of young Mrs.Dassonville, who must, as he recalled her, have been shaped by much the same frame of life as Eunice Goodward--the Lovely Lady.

The long unused phrase had risen unconsciously to his lips on the day that he had brought Eunice her ring.

He had spent a whole week in the city choosing it; three little flawless, oblong emeralds set with diamonds, almost encircling her finger with the mystic number seven.