"When was this call?" I asked.
"The day before yesterday."
"And where is Jerry today?"
"I have a notion that he is spending the afternoon with Miss Marcia Van Wyck," he said with a smile.
CHAPTER IX
FOOT-WORK
I should very much like to have been present while Jerry made some of his visits to the house of the girl Marcia in order to have heard with my own ears what she said to Jerry in those first few weeks of their acquaintance. Some of it, a very little, I did learn from Jerry's letters to me, but much more from Jack Ballard, who visited the lady upon his own account and supplied the missing links in my information as to the growing friendship. But the nature of Jerry's feelings toward her I can only surmise by my knowledge of the character of the boy himself through which I tried to peer as with my own eyes, at the personality of this extraordinary female. That she was more than ordinarily clever there was no reason to doubt; that she was attractive to the better class of young men in her own set was beyond dispute; that she was thoroughly unscrupulous as to the means by which she attained her ends (whatever they were) seemed more than probable. Perhaps she did not differ greatly from other young female persons in her own walk of life, but I would have been better pleased if Jerry's education in the ways of the world could have proceeded a little more slowly. It seemed to me as I compared them, that the girl Una, who had called herself Smith, brazen as she was, would have been a much saner companion. I could not believe, of course, that either of them could sway Jerry definitely from the path of right thinking, but I realized that the eleven years during which Jerry had been all mine were but a short period of time when compared to the years that lay before him. From the description I had of her, the Van Wyck girl was not at all the kind of female that I thought Jerry would like. She was an exotic, and was redolent, I am sure, of faint sweet odors which would perplex Jerry, who had known nothing but the smell of the forest balsams. She was effete and oriental, Jerry clean and western.
But, of course, I had not met the girl and my opinion of her was based upon the merest guesses as to her habits and character. She seemed to be, according to Ballard, essentially feminine (whatever he meant by that) and in spite of her protestations to Jerry as to her self-sufficiency and soundness, to have a faculty for ingratiating herself into the fullest confidence of the young men who came into her net.
In looking over the above, it occurs to me that I may be accused of prejudice against or unfairness to this girl of whom I really knew so little, for if I do not tell the truth, this work has no value. But upon consideration I have decided to let my opinions stand, leaving my own personal point of view to weigh as little or as much as it may in the mind of my reader. To say that I was jealous of Jerry's attentions to any young woman would be as far from the truth as to say that I was not jealous for his happiness. But as several weeks went by and Jerry did not appear at the Manor, his notes meanwhile becoming more and more fragmentary, I found a conviction slowly growing in my mind that my importance in Jerry's scheme of things was diminishing with the days. One afternoon just before the dinner hour I was reading Heminge and Condell's remarkable preface to the "Instauratio Magna" of Bacon, which advances the theory that the state of knowledge is not greatly advancing and that a way must be opened for the human understanding entirely different from any known. In the midst of my studies Jerry rushed in, flushed with his long drive in the open air, and threw his great arms around my neck, almost smothering me.