"What did you expect? After all it's only two years, even if it seems a million."
"I guess I was trying to do one of mummy's tricks, get all primed up just because I didn't want to. Jean, if you had changed, I'd have busted on the spot."
"Well, you can stay whole then because I haven't. Now get off those things. I feel as if you had dropped in for ten minutes."
"I haven't, so get rid of any such hopes. I am going to stay a week or more. I don't care whether it's convenient or not. During the day I shall be out on my deep and serious mission, but I expect the evenings. Oh Jeany, do tell me what he's like. I've been expiring for months. You never did describe him to me, you know, and I was too delicate to ask. He might have only one eye or be bald. Is he?"
"No. He's neither lame, halt nor blind and I won't tell you a thing until you get those things off and I make some tea."
When Jean had drawn the tea table close to the window that looked out across the tops of the roofs to the crown of the Berkeley Hills, Pat demanded:
"Now, go clear back to the beginning and tell me everything. Your letters on the subject were the most unsatisfactory things ever penned by the hand of man. Get out that mental searchlight and turn on the analysis. Why did you fall in love? How does it feel? Were you swept off your feet or did you just get dragged under? Begin."
"I don't know, Patsy. Honestly, I don't know."
"Good Heavens! If that isn't the most Jeanesque performance ever! Here you can spend years rooting about in your soul for the whys and the wherefores of some silly thing that doesn't have a why or a wherefore, and for a big thing like getting married, you don't know why you did it! It sounds to me as if you had fallen so head over heels into the sea of love that you blinded yourself."
"No, I don't think I did that." There was no answering laughter in Jean's eyes and the twinkle vanished from Pat's. "We had a lot in common and used to have such glorious days out of doors together and he wanted to write and I believed I could help him. He'd always been alone and no one had ever taken any interest in the things he cared most deeply about until we met, and it seemed to me, from the very first moment, as if I had known him always."