Letters had long since ceased to come from Aunt Jerry Darby to her niece, although in a friendly and patiently expectant form Eugene Wellington wrote beautiful missives breathing more and more of commercialized ideals and less and less of esthetic dreams, and not at all of the faith that had marked the spiritual refinement of his young manhood.
The third spring brought busy, trying days. A sick teacher made it necessary for the well ones to do double work. The youngest Lenwell boy, leader of the Senior class, started the annual and eternally trivial and annoying Senior-class fuss that seems fated to precede most high-school commencements. For two years it had been Jerry Swaim, whose mathematical mind seemed gifted with a wonderful generalship, who had managed to bring the class to harmony with an ease never known in the New Eden High School before. This year Clare Lenwell was perfectly irreconcilable, and Jerry, overworked, as willing teachers always are, was too busy to bring the belligerents to time before the bitterness of a town-split was upon the community. When she did come to the rescue of the superintendent, his own inefficiency to cope with the case became so evident that he at once turned against the young woman who "tried to run things," as he characterized her to the school board.
That caused an explosion of heavy artillery from the "Commercial Hotel and Garage," which made one member of the board, an uncle of young Lenwell, to rise in arms, and thus and so the fires of dissension crisscrossed the town, threatening to fulmine over the whole Sage Brush Valley. To make the matter more difficult, the town trouble-maker, Stellar Bahrr, for once seemed to have been innocently drawn into the thing, and everybody knew it was better to have Stellar Bahrr's good-will than to start her tongue.
York Macpherson and Junius Brutus Ponk both felt sure that Stellar had really stirred up the Lenwells, for whom she was constantly sewing; and, besides, a distant relative of theirs had married into the Bahrr family back where Stellar came from, "which must have been the Ark," Ponk declared, "and the other one of the pair died of seasickness." Anyhow, the local school row became the local town row, and it was a very real and bitter row.
In these days of little foxes that were threatening the whole vineyard, Jerry turned more and more to Joe Thomson. All of New Eden was tied up in the fuss, took sides, and talked it, except the Macphersons and a few of their friends, and they talked it without taking sides because the thing was in the air constantly. Jerry could not find even in "Castle Cluny" a refuge from what was uninteresting to her and thoroughly distasteful in itself. Ponk, being by nature a rabid little game-cock, was full of the thing, and was no more companionable than the Macphersons. But when the quiet ranchman came up from the lower Sage Brush country, his dark eyes glowing with pleasure and his poised mind unbiased by neighborhood failings, he brought the breath of sweet clover with his coming. When Jerry came home from their long rides up-stream—they never rode toward the blowout region—she felt as if she had a new grip on life and energy and ambition for her work. Joe was becoming, moreover, the best of entertainers, and the comradeship was the one thing Jerry had learned to prize most in her new life in the Middle West.
When the spring had slipped into early May Joe's visits grew less frequent, on account of his spring work. And once or twice he came to town and hurried away without even seeing Jerry. It comforted her greatly—she did not ask herself why—that he did drop a note into the post-office for her, telling her he was in town and regretting that he must hurry out without calling.
It was during this time that Thelma Ekblad came up to New Eden to do some extensive shopping and spend a week with the Macphersons. There were other guests at "Castle Cluny," and Thelma and Jerry shared the same room.
Back in "Eden" the heir apparent would never have dreamed of sharing anything with a Winnowoc grub. How times change us! Or do we change them?
Thelma was sunny-natured, spotlessly neat in her dress, and altogether vastly more companionable to Jerry than the Lenwell girls, who would persist in pleading their little high-school Senior brother's cause; or even the associate teachers, who were troubled and tired and overworked like herself.
Jerry had met Thelma often, and thought of her oftener, in the three years since they had come upon the Sage Brush branch of the local freight together one hot, sand-blown June day, three summers before. She had woven a romance about Thelma. Romances seemed now to belong to other people. They never came to her. She was glad, however, when Thelma's shopping was done and she went back to the farm down the Sage Brush, and her brother Paul, and the growing, joyous Belkap child who filled the plain farm-house with interest.