IV
Trenton wrote every day, letters in which there was no attempt to disguise his love for her. He hadn’t warned her against keeping his letters but she destroyed each one after writing her reply. These answers were little more than notes which she wrote and rewrote in trepidation lest she say too much or too little. Now that he had declared himself and was reiterating daily his complete absorption in her as to everything that affected his future she could afford to risk certain reserves and coynesses. But she did love him; she had positively settled this question. It was a tremendous thing that had happened to her, the realization of a great love, love awakened at a first meeting and endowed with all the charm of romance and the felicity of clandestine adventure. In one of her notes, written with her door locked—her family imagined her to be zealously devoting herself to her French studies—she wrote:
It is all like a dream. I never cease to marvel that you should care for me.... Every note you send me is a happy surprise. If one failed to come I think I should die.... You wanted me to take time to think. That is like my good and true knight. But I want you to consider too,—everything.... Your world is so much bigger than mine. Any day you may meet some one so much finer than I am, so much worthier of your love.... I like to think that it all had to be just as it has been,—you and I wandering toward each other, guided and urged on by destiny.
To her intimations that he might have regrets he replied in his next message with every assurance that he, too, shared her feeling that their meeting had been predestined of all time. Now and then in his life, he wrote, he had felt the hand of a directing and beneficent fate. She wondered how he would have replied to a direct question as to the forces that had combined to bring about his marriage to the woman he had no doubt loved at some time, but she refrained. In Grace’s thoughts, Mrs. Ward Trenton, the Mary Graham Trenton who sought clues to social problems and moved restlessly about the country proclaiming revolutionary ideas, was receding further and further toward a vanishing point.
At the end of a week she became restless, eager for Trenton’s return. She several times considered telegraphing him to make haste, but after going once to the telegraph office at her lunch hour and writing the message she tore it up. He had asked her to wire whenever she was sure; the mere sending of a telegram would commit her irrevocably. It was not so easy as she had imagined to write the words which meant that after pondering the matter with the gravity it demanded she was ready to enter into a relationship with him which would have no honest status, no protection, but would be just such an arrangement as Irene maintained with Kemp.
Irene, aware of Trenton’s daily letters, now refrained from giving her further encouragement to the affair. On the other hand she seemed disposed to counsel caution.
“Some days you seem as cheerful as a spring robin and then again you don’t seem so chipper. You don’t want to take your love affairs so hard!”
“Oh, we’re just having a little flirtation, that’s all,” said Grace carelessly.
“That’s not the way you’re acting! You’re terribly intense, Grace. I knew you had temperament, but I didn’t know you had so much. But I’ll say this for Ward, that he’s a fine, manly fellow,—frankly a much finer type than Tommy Kemp. Tommy’s a sport and Ward isn’t. Ward really has ideals, but such as Tommy has don’t worry him much.”
This left Grace, again a prey to doubts, wondering whether after all Trenton was so utterly different from Kemp. Intellectually he was a higher type than Tommy Kemp, but when it came to morals he was not a bit better.