such a lover as he. No girl could
live in a university town till she was twenty-four and not have love
experiences. I had been made love to by beardless sophomores and gray
professors, and by the athletes and the football giants. But not one
of them made love to me as Ernest did. His arms were around me before I
knew. His lips were on mine before I could protest or resist. Before his
earnestness conventional maiden dignity was ridiculous. He swept me off
my feet by the splendid invincible rush of him. He did not propose. He
put his arms around me and kissed me and took it for granted that
we should be married. There was no discussion about it. The only
discussion--and that arose afterward--was when we should be married.

It was unprecedented. It was unreal. Yet, in accordance with Ernest's
test of truth, it worked. I trusted my life to it. And fortunate was the
trust. Yet during those first days of our love, fear of the future
came often to me when I thought of the violence and impetuosity of his
love-making. Yet such fears were groundless. No woman was ever blessed
with a gentler, tenderer husband. This gentleness and violence on
his part was a curious blend similar to the one in his carriage of
awkwardness and ease. That slight awkwardness! He never got over it,
and it was delicious. His behavior in our drawing-room reminded me of a
careful bull in a china shop.*

* In those days it was still the custom to fill the living
rooms with bric-a-brac. They had not discovered simplicity
of living. Such rooms were museums, entailing endless labor
to keep clean. The dust-demon was the lord of the household.
There were a myriad devices for catching dust, and only a
few devices for getting rid of it.

It was at this time that vanished my last doubt of the completeness of
my love for him (a subconscious doubt, at most). It was at the Philomath
Club--a wonderful night of battle, wherein Ernest bearded the masters
in their lair. Now the Philomath Club was the most select on the Pacific
Coast. It was the creation of Miss Brentwood, an enormously wealthy old
maid; and it was her husband, and family, and toy. Its members were the
wealthiest in the community, and the strongest-minded of the wealthy,
with, of course, a sprinkling of scholars to give it intellectual tone.

The Philomath had no club house. It was not that kind of a club. Once a
month its members gathered at some one of their private house