At the beginning of the summer of 1926 she recapitulated, and acknowledged that she was getting a little hard. She saw most frequently Julian English, Harry Reilly, Carter Davis, and a man from Scranton named Ross Campbell. Julian English was a habit, and she suspected that he went on seeing her because she never said anything about his Polish girl, who was reputed to be beautiful, but whom no one had seen. Harry Reilly was lavish and considerate; in his way, so crazy about her that he was almost self-effacing. Carter Davis was too predictable; she was certain she could tell how many years it would be before the day came when Carter stopped drinking and trying to pick up Irish girls after church Sunday night, and settled down and married a Lantenengo Street girl. “But it won’t be me,” she said. “Imagine life with a man whose deepest passion was bridge. And the Philadelphia Athletics. And the Cornell football team. God!” Ross Campbell was the most likely prospect for marriage. He was older than the others except Reilly, and he was something that did not exist in Gibbsville; one of those Harvard men, tall and slim and swell, who seem to have put on a clean shirt just a minute ago—soft white shirt with button-down collar—and not to have had a new suit in at least two years. He was not rich; he “had money.” He had big strong teeth and his charm had something to do with a deceptive awkwardness, a result of his height, and his St. Paul’s–Harvard voice and accent. He became a non-resident member of the Lantenengo Country Club as a matter of course when he began to see Caroline, and that was when Caroline first noticed that he was, besides everything else, a snob. He told her he was going to join. “I’ll ask Whitney Hofman to put me up. I think it’d be best to ask him to get someone to second me. I don’t really know anyone else.” He knew some others as well as he knew Whit Hofman, but Caroline saw that what he meant was that Whit Hofman, being the richest and the impeccable young man of Gibbsville, was the only man of whom he would ask a favor. And so Ross was put up by Mr. Whitney Stokes Hofman, seconded by Mrs. Whitney Stokes Hofman; initiation fee $50, annual dues $25. Then she noticed that he was a bit on the stingy side. He always added restaurant charges before signing the checks. He rolled his own cigarettes, which may have been an honest preference in tobacco, but looked like an economy; and once after winning a few dollars in a bridge game at the club he pocketed his winnings with the remark: “That covers my gas and oil expenses this trip. Not bad.” This somehow did not fit in with what you would expect of a man whose life work was “keeping the estate’s affairs in shape. I have to. Mother doesn’t know the multiplication table higher than the six-times table.” Caroline began to see that she was right about his not being a coal-region rich man. Some of the things that made him himself were things that she liked—his manners, his manner, his way of walking into any party with a smile that was pleasant enough but at the same time said, “What have you got to offer me?” She liked the simple fact of his not ever trying to kiss her; she liked it and kept postponing her inquiry as to the reason for it. But by postponing that, or any and all inquiry, she did something else; she lost interest in him. The day came when she did not have to postpone the analysis of his diffidence, and she became merely satisfied with his diffidence. There was no showdown, because she let him see what had happened: she did not care if he never came to Gibbsville. She did not condone her behavior. She knew that her friends—and not only those of her own sex—were for the first time a little in awe of her, practically rediscovering her, because Ross Campbell so obviously was interested in her. She was sorry for her friends, who already were thinking of the New York and Boston ushers; and in a not quite sincere way, she was sorry for herself. After all, there had been six or seven times when she had liked him so enormously at particular moments that she wanted to get closer to him, to put her arms around him. But she never had, and the whole thing spilled away. It wasn’t long before it became very, very easy to think of him as a stick, a stuffed shirt.
At the same time she was worried and angry with herself. There was something wrong and incomplete in her relations with all the men she had liked best and loved. They were wrong, and circumstances were wrong; Jerome Walker had been too decent because she was too young; Joe Montgomery was the man she had loved most in her life, but because of an engagement with other people, she had not seen him on the night before she sailed; Ross Campbell, who was not a great love but certainly was the right man for her to marry, had turned into nothing, right before her eyes. And there weren’t any other men; led by Julian English there were a lot of men whom she had kissed or necked with, whom she disliked in retrospect with what approached a passion. Altogether she was contemptuous of the men she had known, no matter how tenderly she remembered minutes in automobiles, motorboats, trains, steamships; on divans or a few times on beds at house parties; on the porches of country clubs, in her own home. But she thought with anger that there was nothing of her that the race of men had not known—except that no one man ever had known her completely. Up to now the passion she had generated would have been enough to—she never finished that. She made up her mind to one thing: if she wasn’t married by the time she was thirty, she was going to pick out some man and say, “Look here, I want to have a child,” and go to France or some place and have the child. She knew she never would do that, but one part of her threatened another part of her with it.
Then, in the spring of 1926, she fell in love with Julian English, and she knew she never had loved anyone else. It was funny. Why, it was the funniest thing in the world. Here he was, taking her out, kissing her good night, ignoring her, seeing a lot of her and then not seeing her at all, going together to dancing school, kindergarten, Miss Holton’s School—she’d known him all her life, had hidden his bicycle up a tree, wet her pants at one of his birthday parties, been bathed in the same tub with him by two older girls who now had children of their own. He had taken her to her first Assembly, he had put clay on her leg when a yellow-jacket stung her, he had given her a bloody nose—and so on. For her there never had been anyone else. No one else counted. She was a little afraid that he still loved the Polish girl a little, but she was sure he loved Caroline the most.
They dodged being in love at first, and because they always had been friends, his seeing her increasingly more frequently did not become perceptible until he asked her to go with him to the July 3 Assembly. You asked a girl at least a month in advance for the Assemblies, and you asked the girl you liked best. It was the only one he ever freely had asked her to; she knew his mother told him to ask her to the very first one. The Assembly was not just another dance, and in the time between her accepting and the night of the dance they both were conscious of it. A girl gave preference in dates to the man who was taking her to the Assembly. “You’re my girl now,” he would say. “Or at least till after the Assembly.” Or she would call him up and say: “Do you want to drive to Philadelphia with Mother and me? You’re my beau now, so I thought I’d ask you first, but don’t say yes unless you really want to.” When he would kiss her she could tell he was trying to find out how much she knew. The long kisses in the beginning were like that; no overwhelming passion, but lazy and full of curiosity. They would halt in a long kiss and she would draw back her head and smile at him and he at her, and then without speaking he would put his mouth to hers again. He left it at kissing until one night when he brought her home from the movies and she went upstairs for a minute and saw that her mother was sound asleep. He was in the lavatory on the first floor and he heard her come down the back steps and try the kitchen door. They went to the library. “Do you want a glass of milk?” she said.