o hold Father's interest, too. And he knew a lot about innumerable
things in which Mother was interested. He stayed four days; and all
the while he was there, I never so much as thought of ceremonious
dress and dinners, and liveried butlers and footmen; nor did it once
occur to me that our simple kitchen Nora, and Old John's son at the
wheel of our one motorcar, were not beautifully and entirely adequate,
so unassumingly and so perfectly did Jerry unmistakably "fit in."
(There are no other words that so exactly express what I mean.) And in
the end, even his charm and his triumph were so unobtrusively complete
that I never thought of being surprised at the prompt capitulation of
both Father and Mother.

Jerry had brought the ring. (Jerry always brings his "rings"--and
he never fails to "put them on.") And he went back to New York with
Mother's promise that I should visit them in July at their cottage in
Newport.

They seemed like a dream--those four days--after he had gone; and I
should have been tempted to doubt the whole thing had there not been
the sparkle of the ring on my finger, and the frequent reference to
Jerry on the lips of both Father and Mother.

They loved Jerry, both of them. Father said he was a fine, manly young
fellow; and Mother said he was a dear boy, a very dear boy. Neither of
them spoke much of his painting. Jerry himself had scarcely mentioned
it to them, as I remembered, after he had gone.

I went to Newport in July. "The cottage," as I suspected, was twice
as large and twice as pretentious as the New York residence; and it
sported twice the number of servants. Once again I was caught in the
whirl of dinners and dances and motoring, with the addition of tennis
and bathing. And always, at my side, was Jerry, seemingly living only
upon my lightest whim and fancy. He wished to paint my portrait; but
there was no time, especially as my visit, in accordance with Mother's
inexorable decision, was of only one week's duration.

But what a wonderful week that was! I seemed to be under a kind of
spell. It was as if I were in a new world--a world such as no one had
ever been in before. Oh, I knew, of course, that others had loved--but
not as we loved. I was sure that no one had ever loved as we loved.
And it was so much more wonderful than anything I had ever dreamed
of--this love of ours. Yet all my life since my early teens I had
been thinking and planning and waiting for it--love. And now it had
co