It had been here at Felicity’s tall house, overlooking a square in which an especially fine weeping copper-beech tree formed the centrepiece, that Alice had first encountered Dr Nolan. He was not prepossessing. A wide nose sat at the centre of a wide face, the effect of both exaggerated by two small dark eyes, like boot buttons. The hair was soft and meagre and of no particular colour: hair the sparsity of which would have been charming on a small child but was, on the top of a grown man, hardly adequate. The scantness of the hair on his head was not, however, equalled by that on his chin. His cheeks were seldom entirely clean-shaven, for he was one of those unfortunates whom nature required to shave twice a day if he were to maintain a semblance of neatness. The effect was as of iron filings sprinkled across the visage: he had been better to have worn a beard. His one advantage was height, for he stood something over six feet tall in his stockinged feet.

Dr Nolan had become quite a favourite of Aunt Felicity’s, for he had a fine mind and was lively in conversation. Some of his ideas, regarding advances in his profession, seemed to the older lady to be dangerously modern; but a man may as well keep up with innovations, if he is to progress in his occupation. Secretly, she hoped to find him a wife. In this plan Alice was an enthusiastic accomplice, for she too had warmed to the doctor, who – for he was the brother of sisters – was unusually at ease in female society. But Nolan’s attractions, being those of temperament and mind, were not immediately apparent to younger women. Alice herself had been drawn to William Gale by his dark hair, fine colouring and the clarity and force of his blue-eyed gaze: the young women of today were no different in their liking for good looks. In any case Alice and her aunt could summon from their combined store of nieces and cousins no more than four or five suitable girls between them. It came to Alice that perhaps the widow Lockwood could be a candidate. Then too there was Emily, who had been engaged to poor Algie. Almost daily, it seemed, the war against Russia made more widows and broken sweethearts.

Alice scribbled a note to her aunt proposing herself, and a second to Mrs Lockwood. After she had returned home from the latter call she wrote to her husband: