So the transaction was completed in silence.
III
JERRY AND EUGENE—AND JOE
XIII
HOW A GOOD MOTHER LIVES ON
New Eden never saw a more beautiful autumn, even in this land of exquisite autumn days, than the first one that Jerry Swaim passed in the Middle West. And Jerry reveled in it. For, while she missed the splendid colorings of the Eastern woodlands, she never ceased to marvel at the clear, bright days, the sweet, bracing air, the wondrous sweeps of landscapes overhung by crystal skies, the mist-wreathed horizons holding all the softer hues, from jasper red to purest amethyst, that range the foundation stones of heaven's walls as Saint John saw them in his dream exquisite.
It had never occurred to Jerry that a beauty impossible to a wooded broken country might be found on the October prairies. Her dream of a Kansas "Eden" exactly like the Pennsylvania "Eden," six times enlarged, had been shattered with one glimpse of her possession—a possession henceforth to be a thing forgotten. But life had opened new pages for her and she was learning to read them rapidly and well.
One thought of the past remained, however. The memory of a romance begun in her Eastern home would not die with the telling. And while Jerry Swaim persuaded herself that what Eugene Wellington called success to her was failure, and while every day widened the breach between the two, time and distance softened her harsher judgment, and she remembered her would-be lover with a tender sadness that made her heart cold to the thought of any other love.