I did not meet Jerry Weston again for nearly a year; but that did not mean that I did not hear of him.  I wonder if Helen ever noticed how often I used to get her to talk of her home and her family life; and how interested I was in her gallery of portraits on the mantel—­there were two fine ones of her brother there.

Helen was very fond of her brother.  I soon found that she loved to talk about him—­if she had a good listener.  Needless to say she had a very good one in me.

Jerry was an artist, it seemed.  He was twenty-eight years old, and already he had won no small distinction.  Prizes, medals, honorable mention, and a special course abroad—­all these Helen told me about.  She told me, too, about the wonderful success he had just had with the portrait of a certain New York society woman.  She said that it was just going to “make” Jerry; that he could have anything he wanted now—­anything.  Then she told me how popular he always was with everybody.  Helen was not only very fond of her brother, but very proud of him.  That was plain to be seen.  In her opinion, evidently, there was none to be compared with him.

And apparently, in my own mind, I agreed with her—­there was none to be compared with him.  At all events, all the other boys that used to call and bring me candy and send me flowers at about this time suffered woefully in comparison with him!  I remember that.  So tame they were—­so crude and young and unpolished!

I saw Jerry myself during the Easter vacation of my second year in college.  Helen invited me to go home with her, and Mother wrote that I might go.  Helen had been home with me for the Christmas vacation, and Mother and Father liked her very much.  There was no hesitation, therefore, in their consent that I should visit Helen at Easter-time.  So I went.

Helen lived in New York.  Their home was a Fifth-Avenue mansion with nine servants, four automobiles, and two chauffeurs.  Naturally such a scale of living was entirely new to me, and correspondingly fascinating.  From the elaborately uniformed footman that opened the door for me to the awesome French maid who “did” my hair, I adored them all, and moved as in a dream of enchantment.  Then came Jerry home from a week-end’s trip—­and I forgot everything else.

I knew from the minute his eyes looked into mine that whatever I had been before, I was now certainly no mere “Oh, some friend of Helen’s.”  I was (so his eyes said) “a deucedly pretty girl, and one well worth cultivating.”  Whereupon he began at once to do the “cultivating.”

And just here, perversely enough, I grew indifferent.  Or was it only feigned—­not consciously, but unconsciously?  Whatever it was, it did not endure long.  Nothing could have endured, under the circumstances.  Nothing ever endures—­with Jerry on the other side.

In less than thirty-six hours I was caught up in the whirlwind of his wooing, and would not have escaped it if I could.