DIANA DID NOT TAKE THE HAT OFF UNTIL SEVERAL hours later, when she heard a soft knock on the door. Then she scrambled up from her idle writing position, pulled the hat from her head, and dropped the card inside it, quickly shoving both items under the bed and out of sight. The anemic rat-tat-tat on her door repeated itself, and she tucked her diary—whose pages recalled the secret meeting that was inspiring all those dramatic bursts of color—beneath her pillow.

“Who’s there?” she hollered, not bothering to disguise the annoyance in her voice.

The face of her older sister, with its pristine complexion, nudged beyond the door. Her eyes were as wide and blank as when Diana had last seen her in the parlor. The sisters hadn’t spoken since, but that was no surprise. They hadn’t really spoken—at least about anything important—in years.

“May I come in?” she asked gently.

“I suppose,” Diana replied, rolling back to the position she had happily assumed before the interruption, belly down and face toward her pillow. Her diary had been propped against it so that she could write, and now the same pillow was covering that precious compendium of her thoughts. She felt the need to shield it physically from any potential prying on her sister’s part, especially since her sister seemed like such a stranger these days.

Over the past two years, Diana had become used to sisterly betrayals. She had watched Elizabeth grow ever more proper and remote, and where once there had been closeness, now there was a low-lying resentment. The interruption of her sacred diary-writing time felt like a mild affront amongst a host of other, more serious offenses.

“I have something important to tell you,” Elizabeth said, her voice timid. The balance of the bed shifted as she perched herself on the far corner of the white chenille bedspread.

“Oh?” Diana rolled her eyes in the direction of the pillow, for what was important to her sister these days was most often irrelevant to her. And anyway, her thoughts had already turned back to whether Henry Schoonmaker had had many lovers and what exactly his chest would look like with Diana’s head rested against it. She was thinking that it was perhaps fortuitous that her family had chosen just this moment to become poor. Maybe that was the thing that would make her stand out from all the other girls who whispered about him, causing her to glow with a certain compromised luster. She had almost ceased listening to Elizabeth, so enchanting were her musings about Henry, when she thought she heard her sister say his name.

“What?” Diana said, pushing herself up on her elbow and turning to look at Elizabeth.

“Henry, Henry Schoonmaker? He came by this afternoon to propose marriage to me, and now we are engaged. I am to be married, Di—the family is going to be all right.”

Diana squinted her eyes and choked back a laugh. She was about to ask Elizabeth to repeat herself—for surely she had misheard, and mixed up the man in her thoughts with this boring engagement story—when her sister took her hand.

“I know it is all very sudden, but you see they have more money than practically anybody, and Henry is the oldest—the only—son,” Elizabeth explained, sounding as though she were trying to convince herself as much as her sister.

“He asked…you?” Diana said. Her lower lip dropped and her eyes widened in shock. She instinctively pulled her hand back to her chest. Elizabeth looked down, and Diana paused for a few moments to absorb this rancid information. The delicious memory of Henry Schoonmaker teasing her in the dark and dusty unused parlor had been snatched away from her. She wanted it back. “But you don’t even like him,” she went on.

“Perhaps in time…” Elizabeth kept her eyes down on her hands, where she was fidgeting with her cuticles. “He is very handsome, and, well, you know everybody says what a catch he is.”

Diana let out an indignant noise and rolled her eyes to the ceiling. The injustice was searing. It was so like the world to handle her this way, when something was finally about to happen. But her anger was growing, and she was now prepared to turn some of it on the man who was, apparently, her sister’s fiancé.

“Diana, why are you being sullen? This is good news.”

“Because you don’t love him,” Diana replied bitterly. And he doesn’t love you, she added in her thoughts. She might have gone on to say the man Elizabeth was planning on marrying was the worst sort of weasel, and that he had kissed the little sister of his betrothed what must have been mere moments after his proposal, but she did not. With all the novels Diana read, she should have known that villains often come with pretty faces. She had made a classic romantic’s error, mistaking that one beautiful moment when Henry’s lips touched her own for love, but she was going to keep that ugly secret to herself. She had earned it; it was her own. She closed her eyes and said, “Well…congratulations, then.”

Elizabeth smiled blankly and clasped her hands together. Diana had always found this a stupid gesture, and she found it particularly stupid now. “The Schoonmaker family has a very good reputation, and Henry is awfully polite and…” Elizabeth trailed off as if she could not think of a single other nice thing to say about him. She bit her lip then, and Diana thought she saw the glistening of tears in her eyes. “Oh…” she said as she covered her face with her hands.

It seemed pathetic that Elizabeth would be overjoyed to the point of tears by the sudden appearance of a fiancé with means, especially since she clearly didn’t think much of him either. Diana responded with a mocking guttural noise and then went back to looking at her pillow.

“Anyway.” Elizabeth recovered herself, brushing away the moisture from her eyes. “It will be good for mother, and for everyone really, to have a wedding. Flowers and dresses and everything fine and good. Everything new and custom-made…”

Diana sneaked a look back at her sister, and saw that her fair eyebrows had floated upward as she went on about all the pure, ivory, wedding-related things she was going to have. It was as though she’d spent the afternoon trapped in some underground sewer and had only now emerged, starving for any sign of cleanliness. In fact, she had spent the afternoon in the Hollands’ sumptuous parlor, and upon learning of their family’s financial decline had gone straight out and gotten herself engaged to the first wealthy man she could find. Diana couldn’t believe Elizabeth’s idiocy, imagining a white wedding with that slippery bastard Henry Schoonmaker, who had apparently entered their home that afternoon with the intention of finding himself a wife and a mistress. How very convenient for him. Diana wondered if he hadn’t come to repossess some of their furniture as well.

“And Di?” Elizabeth asked, but went on without waiting for Diana to respond. “Penelope and I made a promise to each other, when we were thirteen, that we would be each other’s maids of honor. I hope you understand. But you’ll be one of my bridesmaids, won’t you?”

A mirthless smile crept across Diana’s face. She couldn’t help but appreciate, in a cynical sort of way, this ironic twist—being asked to participate in the ceremony for a union she felt completely disdainful of.

“Fine,” Diana replied in a resigned, world-weary tone. Once her sister was gone, she could begin the diary writing again, and this time in more maudlin hues. Elizabeth emitted a small humming sound of pleasure, and then Diana felt herself being taken up in her sister’s weak embrace.

“Oh, and Diana, don’t tell anybody, all right? Promise you won’t tell anybody.”

“I promise.” Diana shrugged. Her sister’s doings didn’t seem like a very interesting topic, and she hardly knew whom she’d tell, anyway.

“Good.” Elizabeth lowered her eyes. “I just don’t want this all to start happening too soon….”

Nor would that wolfish Henry Schoonmaker, thought Diana. He could doubtless use the extra few months to kiss all the Holland cousins and perhaps one or two of their maids as well.

“Of course,” Diana finally answered her sister. “Your secret affair is safe with me.”

And though she had been searching for words that might cut her sister, just a little bit, Diana couldn’t help but be surprised by the look of shock that crossed her sister’s face. It was just a joke—why couldn’t her sister take even the littlest joke?