Father frowned and scolded, and said, “Tut, tut!” and that I was nothing but a child.  But Mother smiled and shook her head, even while she sighed, and reminded him that I was twenty—­two whole years older than she was when she married him; though in the same breath she admitted that I was young, and she certainly hoped I’d be willing to wait before I married, even if the young man was all that they could ask him to be.

Father was still a little rebellious, I think; but Mother—­bless her dear sympathetic heart!—­soon convinced him that they must at least consent to see this Gerald Weston.  So I sent the wire inviting him to come.

More fearfully than ever then I awaited the meeting between my lover and my father and mother.  With the Westons’ mansion and manner of living in the glorified past, and the Anderson homestead, and its manner of living, very much in the plain, unvarnished present, I trembled more than ever for the results of that meeting.  Not that I believed Jerry would be snobbish enough to scorn our simplicity, but that there would be no common meeting-ground of congeniality.

I need not have worried—­but I did not know Jerry then so well as I do now.

Jerry came—­and he had not been five minutes in the house before it might easily have seemed that he had always been there.  He did know about stars; at least, he talked with Father about them, and so as to 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.