So York came to dinner in one of his rarest moods, a host to make one's worries flee away.
Jerry had reread her letter in the seclusion of her room at "Castle Cluny." It did not need a third reading, for every word seemed graven on the reader's brain. In carefully typewritten form, with only the signature in the writer's own hand, it ran:
My always dear Jerry,—I should have written you days ago, but I did not get back to "Eden" until you had been gone a week. We are all so eager to hear how you are, and to know about the Swaim estate which you went to find. But we are a hundred times more eager to see your face here again. I wish you were here to-night, for I have been in the depths of doubt and indecision, from which your presence would have lifted me. I hope I have done the right thing, now it is done, and I'll wait to hear from you more eagerly than I ever waited for a letter before. Yet I feel sure you will approve of my course after you get over your surprise and have taken time to think carefully.
I had a long heart-to-heart talk with Aunt Jerry to-day. Don't smile and say a purse-to-purse talk. Full purses don't talk to empty ones. They speak a different language. But this to-day was a real confidence game as you might say. I received the confidence if I didn't die as game as you would wish me to.
To be plain, little cousin mine, I want you dreadfully to come back, so much so that I have decided to give up painting for the present and take a clerkship in the bank with Uncle Cornie's partners. I can see your eyes open wide with surprise and disappointment when I tell you that Aunt Jerry has really converted me to her way of thinking. My hours are easy and the pay is good. Not so much as I had hoped to have some day from my brush and may have yet, if this work doesn't make me fat and lazy, for there is really very little responsibility about it, just a decent accuracy. This makes so many things possible, you see, and then I have the satisfaction of knowing I am doing a service for Aunt Jerry—and, to be explicit—to put myself where I shall not have to worry over things when you come home. So I'm happy now. And when you get here I shall begin to live again. I seem to be staying here now. Staying and waiting for something. Nobody really lives at "Eden" without little Jerry to keep us all alive and keyed up. Nobody to take the big car over the bluff road, beautiful as it is—for you know I'm too big a coward to drive it and to do a hundred things I'd do if you were here to brace me up.
Write me at once, little cousin, and say you will come home just as soon as you have seen all of that God-forsaken country you care to look at. And meantime I'll write as often as you want me to. I think of you every day and remember you in my prayers every night. You remember I told you I couldn't pray out in Kansas. May the Lord be good to you and make you love Him more than you think you do now, and bring you safe and soon to our beautiful "Eden."
Yours,
Eugene.
The sands of the blowout on Jerry's claim seared not more hotly her fresh young hopes of prosperity, through her own effort and control, than this sudden change from the artist, with his dreams of beauty and power, to the man of easy clerical duty with a good salary and small responsibility. Of course Aunt Jerry had been back of it all, but so would Aunt Jerry have been back of her—if she had given up.
Jerry sat for a long time staring at the missive where it had fallen on the floor, the typewritten neatness of the blue lettering only a blur to her eyes. For she was back at "Eden," on the steep but beautiful bluff road, with Eugene afraid to drive the big Darby car. She was in the rose-arbor looking up to see that faint line of indecision in the dear, handsome face. She was in the "Eden" parlor under the soft light of rose-tinted lamps, facing Aunt Jerry and sure of herself, but catching again that wavering line of uncertainty on Eugene Wellington's countenance, and her own vague fear—unguessed then—that he might not resist in the supreme test.
But idols die hard. Eugene was her idol. He couldn't die at once. He was so handsome, so true, so gracious, so filled with a love of beautiful things. How could she understand the temptation to the soul of an artist in such lovely settings as "Eden" offered? It was all Aunt Jerry's fault, and he would overcome it. He must.
It was so easy to blame Aunt Jerry. It made everything clear. He had yielded to her cleverness and never known he was being ruled. With all her flippant, careless youth, inexperience, and selfishness, Jerry was a keener reader of human nature than her lack of training could account for. She knew just the lines Aunt Jerry had laid, the net spread for Eugene's feet. But—Oh, things must come out all right. He would change.
This one thought rang up and down her scale of thinking, as if repeating would make true what Jerry knew was false.
"'If a man went right with himself.' Oh, Eugene, Eugene!" she murmured, half aloud. "You hitched your wagon to a star, but to what kind of a star—to what kind of a star?"
Then came a greater query: "Shall I go back to 'Eden,' to Aunt Jerry's rule, to Eugene, to love, to easy, dependent, purposeless living? Shall I?"