It was hers! She did not believe it. It had been done too quickly. It seemed to her she had hardly felt Harry slip it on her finger before they had left the shop; that she had hardly shaken off the musty inclosed atmosphere, before Harry had left her on the corner of California and Powell Streets--left her alone with the ring! Still, she didn't believe she had it, even while she looked at the large lump it made under her glove. She kept feeling it with a cautious finger-tip.
A trio of girls she knew flocked off the California Street car and surrounded her. They were going to the White House for bargains in shirt waists. They wanted to carry her off in their company. They encompassed her in a chatter of lace and lingerie. There were held up to her all the interests of her every-day existence; but these seemed to have no part in her real life. They had never appeared more remote and trivial. She kept her conscious hand in the folds of her skirt. She would have liked to strip off her glove and show them the ring. It would have entertained them so much. To herself its entertainment was of the Arabian Nights--the way of its finding, its beauty in the false setting, the struggle over it in the shop--all were wine to her imagination. It was a thing to conjure adventure; it was a talisman of romance.
She colored faintly as she mentally corrected herself. It was her engagement ring, and as such she had never once thought of it. Strange, when all the forms of her engagement had been so well observed; when Harry himself represented that side of life to which she had tried to form herself from as far back as the old days when her mother had made fun of her fancies. It must be right, she thought, this life of conventions and forms; and the queer way she saw things, something wrong in her. But because she knew herself different, and because she felt life without understanding it, she feared it. It was too big to take hold of alone. And she was so alone; and Harry was so strong, so matter-of-fact; alone like herself, yet adequate in the world she was afraid of. She had accepted him as naturally, and yet as unreally, as she took all that life, and to the moment she had never questioned the wisdom or the happiness. She didn't question now. She only was shocked that so large a fact in her life as her engagement could be completely wiped out for the moment by a thing so trivial. It was not even the ring. It was the feeling she had about the ring. Her imagination was always running away with her, as it had the night at the club. And here it was, still uncurbed, speeding her forward into fields of romance.