I need not have worried—but I did not know Jerry then so well as I do now.
Jerry came—and he had not been five minutes in the house before it might easily have seemed that he had always been there. He did know about stars; at least, he talked with Father about them, and so as to hold Father's interest, too. And he knew a lot about innumerable things in which Mother was interested. He stayed four days; and all the while he was there, I never so much as thought of ceremonious dress and dinners, and liveried butlers and footmen; nor did it once occur to me that our simple kitchen Nora, and Old John's son at the wheel of our one motorcar, were not beautifully and entirely adequate, so unassumingly and so perfectly did Jerry unmistakably "fit in." (There are no other words that so exactly express what I mean.) And in the end, even his charm and his triumph were so unobtrusively complete that I never thought of being surprised at the prompt capitulation of both Father and Mother.
Jerry had brought the ring. (Jerry always brings his "rings"—and
he never fails to "put them on.") And he went back to New York with
Mother's promise that I should visit them in July at their cottage in
Newport.
They seemed like a dream—those four days—after he had gone; and I should have been tempted to doubt the whole thing had there not been the sparkle of the ring on my finger, and the frequent reference to Jerry on the lips of both Father and Mother.
They loved Jerry, both of them. Father said he was a fine, manly young fellow; and Mother said he was a dear boy, a very dear boy. Neither of them spoke much of his painting. Jerry himself had scarcely mentioned it to them, as I remembered, after he had gone.
I went to Newport in July. "The cottage," as I suspected, was twice as large and twice as pretentious as the New York residence; and it sported twice the number of servants. Once again I was caught in the whirl of dinners and dances and motoring, with the addition of tennis and bathing. And always, at my side, was Jerry, seemingly living only upon my lightest whim and fancy. He wished to paint my portrait; but there was no time, especially as my visit, in accordance with Mother's inexorable decision, was of only one week's duration.
But what a wonderful week that was! I seemed to be under a kind of spell. It was as if I were in a new world—a world such as no one had ever been in before. Oh, I knew, of course, that others had loved—but not as we loved. I was sure that no one had ever loved as we loved. And it was so much more wonderful than anything I had ever dreamed of—this love of ours. Yet all my life since my early teens I had been thinking and planning and waiting for it—love. And now it had come—the real thing. The others—all the others had been shams and make-believes and counterfeits. To think that I ever thought those silly little episodes with Paul Mayhew and Freddy Small and Mr. Harold Hartshorn were love! Absurd! But now—
And so I walked and moved and breathed in this spell that had been cast upon me; and thought—little fool that I was!—that never had there been before, nor could there be again, a love quite so wonderful as ours.
At Newport Jerry decided that he wanted to be married right away. He didn't want to wait two more endless years until I was graduated. The idea of wasting all that valuable time when we might be together! And when there was really no reason for it, either—no reason at all!
I smiled to myself, even as I thrilled at his sweet insistence. I was pretty sure I knew two reasons—two very good reasons—why I could not marry before graduation. One reason was Father; the other reason was Mother. I hinted as much.