Dear Aunt Verena,—I am most awfully sorry to hear from Hazel about your accident. I hope it’s only a blighty and that you will soon be fit again. As I am a great believer in good news as a buck-me-up, I hasten to tell you before anyone else that I am engaged to be married. Every one has always said that I should be all the better for settling down, and really with such a pet as Trixie I am sure they are right. I have not known her very long—we met at a dance at Prince’s—but there are some people that you feel in a minute or so you have known all your life, and she is one of them. If you were not so ill I should bring her to see you at once.
She has fair hair, bobbed, and her father is a swell in the India Office. I have not met either him or her mother yet, but Trixie is to let me know directly a favourable opportunity occurs and then I shall butt in. I rather dread the interview, as Mr. Parkinson—that’s her father’s name—is said to be dashed peppery and to have set his heart on her marrying coin; but I daresay I shall pull myself together and play the game. Meanwhile Trixie wants to keep the engagement a secret; and except for two or three pals you are the only person I have told. I haven’t even told Hazel.
I ought to tell you that she can drive a car and knows all about them, so she ought to be really a helpmate, as all wives should be, don’t you think? She is nearly eighteen and as I am nearly twenty it is splendid. I have always believed that husbands ought to be older than their wives. It gives them authority. We are thinking of taking our honeymoon in a two-seater on which I have had my eye for some time; but it is rather costly. Everything costs such a lot nowadays. Trixie says she finds me such a relief after so many soldiers. You see, having been in the Army such a short time, I am almost, she says, a civilian; really her first civilian friend; but of course if the War hadn’t stopped I should still be a soldier too.—Your sincere nephew,
Roy
P.S.—I’m awfully sorry about your being seedy. There’s nothing like keeping fit and I was never so full of beans myself. Get well soon. Cheerio!