Next day there is an entry: “I didn’t know we were engaged until he told me, ‘Why, of course, we are.’”
Thus simply does youth plight its troth. They had been together and he had kissed her, and so, of course, they were engaged. Of course, they were ready to fight the long battle of life side by side, and she who had given so much in her kiss had walked out past the doors of girlhood; through that one light touch she felt that her whole life must be then surrendered to the boy who had had the magic word for her. They decided to tell no one on account of their youth.
No sooner did this honest lad have my rainbow Ellen in his hands than he started in trying to make some one else of her. I read her journal that follows with a certain heartache because I was not blameless in this matter. I, too, wanted to take this gay and shimmering child and turn her into something else; trim her generosities and check her impulses.
Another thing that makes me rage is the fact that my knowledge of the lives of men teaches me that, had Ellen had one little affectation in which to clothe herself, her young lover would have been on his knees before her instead of being the pedantic young master. Ellen’s journal at this time varies from a thing glittering with life, from being drunk with the heady wine of being beloved for the first time, to a book of copy-book maxims, beginning with: “Edward says I must read—or do—or act—or mustn’t.”
Poor young man! He wrote her decalogues by the dozen, and yet the tragedy of him is that he tasted her special quality and loved her while trying to kill it. The youth of Ellen and her high joy of living carried him along in spite of himself, though he always made Ellen pay for his happiness by lectures on the seriousness of life.
It was here that Alec began to perceive the place he had in her life. They had a game they played that they called “Two Years Ago,” in which they outdid their own childish pranks. Ellen remarks ingenuously:—
“I suppose that I ought to tell Edward how Alec and I rest ourselves from growing up, but there is no place in him to tell this to. I tried it with Roberta, and she just understood what it was about, but doesn’t see why I want to do it; and I don’t know myself exactly, except that I just have to.”
Then from one day to another Alec was sent West to an uncle and two weeks later, as had been planned, Edward left. He was to go away for a year and a half, and then come back and formally ask for Ellen’s hand. It shocked Ellen terribly that she missed Alec most.
Through all the year and a half that followed, Ellen never told me anything of what was in her mind, nor did she tell her mother, and here is the characteristic of their young girlhood that people seem to forget—this nameless reticence. So, alone, she went through the crucial thing that falling out of love always is. Another girl in her situation might have deceived herself, the idea of a grown-up lover was such a pleasant one to a girl of Ellen’s age. Ellen was unaware of the disillusion she was preparing for herself. She writes, appalled:—
“I don’t know what has happened to me, I can only describe it by saying I have waked up. I know now that I am not in love with Edward and I just understood this from one day to another. He has not done anything at all. He writes me just the way he always has. He hasn’t changed, so I suppose I am fickle and bad, and that I can’t trust myself, for if this wasn’t real, I don’t know what can be real, and yet I feel as though I had never loved him at all. I sometimes wonder if I should have become engaged to some other person if it had happened that some other person had kissed me.”