She loved flowers and trees and grass.
She was interested in everything.
She had a lot of information and a lot of sense.
There was nothing she couldn't talk about.
Sometimes when we'd been for a walk in the afternoon and we met at a night club and she'd had a couple of glasses of champagne, that was enough to make her completely buffy, you know, and she was the life and soul of the party, I couldn't help thinking how amazed the rest of them would be if they knew how seriously we'd been talking only a few hours before.
It was an extraordinary contrast.
There seemed to be two entirely different women in her.'
Carruthers said all this without a smile.
He spoke with the melancholy he might have used if he had been speaking of some person snatched from the pleasant company of the living by untimely death.
He gave a deep sigh.
'I was madly in love with her.
I proposed to her half a dozen times.
Of course I knew I hadn't a chance. I was only a very junior clerk at the F.O., but I couldn't help myself.
She refused me, but she was always frightfully nice about it.
It never made any difference to our friendship.
You see, she really liked me.
I gave her something that other people didn't.
I always thought that she was really fonder of me than of anybody.
I was crazy about her.'
'I don't suppose you were the only one,' I said, having to say something.
'Far from it.
She used to get dozens of love letters from men she'd never seen or heard of, farmers in Africa, miners, and policemen in Canada.
All sorts of people proposed to her.
She could have married anyone she liked.'
'Even royalty, one heard.'
'Yes, she said she couldn't stand the life.
And then she married Jimmie Welldon-Burns.'
'People were rather surprised, weren't they?'
'Did you ever know him?'
'No, I don't think so.
I may have met him, but he left no impression on me.'
'He wouldn't.
He was the most insignificant fellow that ever breathed.
His father was a big manufacturer up in the North.
He'd made a lot of money during the war and bought a baronetcy.
I believe he hadn't an aitch to his name.
Jimmy was at Eton with me, they'd tried hard to make a gentleman of him, and in London after the war he was about a good deal.
He was always willing to throw a party.
No one ever paid any attention to him.
He just paid the bill.
He was the most crashing bore.
You know, rather prim, terribly polite; he made you rather uncomfortable because he was so anxious not to do the wrong thing.
He always wore his clothes as though he'd just put them on for the first time and they were a little too tight for him.'
When Carruthers innocently opened his Times one morning and casting his eyes down the fashionable intelligence of the day saw that a marriage had been arranged between Elizabeth, only daughter of the Duke of St Erth, and James, eldest son of Sir John Welldon-Burns, Bart, he was dumbfounded.
He rang Betty up and asked if it was true.
'Of course,' she said.
He was so shocked that for the moment he found nothing to say.
She went on speaking.
'He's bringing his family to luncheon today to meet father.
I dare say it'll be a bit grim.