Camas Prairie Chronicle

Baby Love
By ETHEL HOLMES

That love which springs up between two young persons of opposite sex is like the child that comes to them after marriage. It has its babyhood, its childhood and its youth. As a baby is a delicate little thing, liable to be snuffed out by the slightest adverse happening, so is the beginning of love.

Young love has its measles, its whooping cough and its colic.

Charlie Edmonds was twenty-one and Rosa Lee eighteen when they became engaged. There was a cyclone of ecstasy for twenty-four hours, then a revulsion. Charlie wondered if he hadn't done something dreadful. He wanted to go right off and put himself back where he was before; but, being a man of honor and not seeing how he could honorably do so, he hesitated. Besides, he shrank from going back on the wild enthusiasm of the initial transports and confessing that he was so unstable. The truth is he was staggered by the responsibilities he had assumed.

Forty-eight hours' absence from his love was quite enough to cause him to forget the responsibilities and to long for another kiss. It was 5 o'clock in the afternoon when this new phase came over him, and he resolved to go to see her after dinner. That would be 8 o'clock. How would he get through those intervening three hours?

At half past 7 he could stand it no longer and started for her home. Fortunately it required fifteen minutes to get there. He saw a figure at the front window and on entering the drawing room saw the girl sitting in the gloaming. He advanced to embrace her. She waved him back.

"I suppose it is all a mistake," she said.

"All a mistake!" His heart sank within him.

"Yes. It is impossible that you can love me and remain away from me all these long days."

"All these long days! Why, we have been engaged only since the night before last."

"I sat here in this window waiting for you till 9 o'clock, then went to bed and cried all night."

"Poor, dear little girl," he said, winding his arms about her and snuggling her face—or, rather, her lips—against his.

The first spasm of baby love had passed and was succeeded by six hours of rapture.

He started to go at 2 a. m., got to the drawing room door at 2:15, and the last kiss was at 2:30 in the vestibule.

Baby love didn't have a spasm or anything else for another two days.

Meanwhile Charlie was getting down to engaged life quite rapidly. A man moves from one position to another; a woman, in certain respects, is apt to remain where she finds herself. Baby love had all the children's ills, but with every one Charlie gained by experience and came to consider them a matter of course. Three months after his engagement he called on his fiance one evening to find symptoms that shortly before would have been alarming.

"It's perfectly evident," said Rosa, withdrawing from him as he advanced to give the usual lovers' salute, "that this cannot go on any longer."

"What can't go on any longer?"

"Why, your indifference to me when we are in other company."

"What have I done now?"

"Do you think that your treatment of me at Mrs. Randall's garden party was such as I have a right to expect?"

"What did I do?"

"You know very well what you did. When I asked you to get me an ice, instead of doing so at once you continued your conversation with Mrs. Fitz Gerald, paying no attention to me whatever."

"Mrs. Fitz Gerald was telling me an incident that happened to her. I could not break away from her in the middle of her story, could I?"

"You didn't wish to break away from her. You were listening with rapt attention."

"Surely you're not"—

"Jealous? Oh, dear, no. I wouldn't think of being jealous of an old woman like that. She's twenty-eight if she's a day."

For the first time since his engagement woman's unreasonableness began to rub the wrong way. His brow lowered.

"You say that things can't go on any longer in this way. Do you mean that our engagement must be broken?"

"Unless I can be assured that you are not to be caught by any married woman who chooses to throw a spell over you."

"I thought you said you were not jealous of Mrs. Fitz Gerald."

"I'm not. Mrs. Fitz Gerald is not the only designing woman there is in the world."

"What do you wish me to do?"

This was a poser. Rosa, not having any reply to make, was silent. She had had her say and was ready to make it up. She stood looking down at the floor, and as there was no antagonism in her expression Charlie went to her and took her in his arms.

Charlie hoped that the end of these paroxysms would come with marriage. They did not end with the wedding day nor with the honeymoon. Not till a real baby came was there a perceptible change. Then Charlie suddenly discovered that his wife had found another love which took the edge off the first. A genuine rival had displaced him.