Your Gilbert Finch ought to give some thought to his future, Mr. Eliot said, not looking at his daughter. You may not think it’s important, but it is.

We’ll all be interested to see what happens, said Mrs. Eliot, flushed and happy.

Yes, we will, said Lilian with what she meant to be defiance. Her being with Gilbert Finch was a grand opening up of the world, a world that stretched far and away from this dining room table.

Just then Lilian looked down at her hand and saw with terror that the engagement ring she’d picked out with Gilbert at Mr. Parson’s wasn’t there. She excused herself from the table, ransacked her room, going through her pockets, looking under the bed. She paused for a moment before becoming hysterical. She sent off a note to the Somerset Club where she’d lunched, and one to the shop on Boylston Street where she’d gotten the towels, and finally one to the Searses’ where she and Marian had been for tea. She hardly slept the night. In the morning she heard from Louis Joseph that they’d found nothing, and a withering note came from Elsie Sears saying they’d looked between the cushions of every chair but had turned up nothing. The phone rang. It was the Somerset Club. The ring had been found near the washbasins in the ladies’ lounge.

Gilbert fetched it on his way to dinner that night, and put it once again on Lilian’s finger. He appeared unruffled by the incident.

Have you done something to it? she said, gazing at him as if he were a magician. It seems to have gotten bigger.

Gilbert Finch merely shrugged.

30 • Abroad

30 • Abroad

IN EVERY direction lay the ocean as round as a saucer rimmed at the horizon where it met the sky. She sat on the ocean liner, taking her morning tea in the shade of a green awning with a writing tablet propped in her lap. On her left hand, holding down the fluttering paper, her ring sent off tiny sparks. July 1, 1926, she wrote. My Dearest Love.

Lilian Eliot was generally plunged in gloom having to be on a boat for an ocean crossing, and got the urge to jump off if they didn’t land soon, but this time she was willing to sit on deck for hours and watch the horizon and the sea change color. She thought of Gilbert Finch, and of the way he signed his letters, Yrs, GPF. She would soon stop that.

She tried gin for the first time and her head spun — not the room merely her head. The son of a duke sat beside the Eliots on deck, but since he did nothing about it neither did they.