Well, it was nice, quite a light story with a tiny bit of spy-stuff in it, but mostly light-hearted romance. I was okay with no real angst and no real spy-stuff, since I wasn’t in the mood, but if I were a spy story lover this definitely won’t do, it was so little.
It was for the most part dialogues, a little bit of description of people or circumstances when needed, and, well, also things let unfinished, probably because not so important to the romance.
The nice part was that there was no prolongued angst, so often due to characters keeping secrets and not talking things out.
We follow Patty from start to finish. She is engaged to Billee Farsworth, a big young man that she calls Little Billee. Despite this, her friend Phil swears his love to her and is sure it’s only a small crush and she’ll change her mind.
He thinks, and tells her so, that “I do think that you don’t quite know your own mind” and “you’re a fickle little thing”, but indeed she stays true to her Billee and never wavers in any other direction.
Billee must leave New York for Washington because he is an engineer and has an important role in the war and is a Captain. She stays home, but they are engaged and write often to each other.
She spends time with her cousin Helen “Bumble” who came to visit and with Phil, and throws parties to entertain military boys away from home, and after Phil another one falls for her, a guy called Herron.
Patty is gentle and good and never wants to hurt anybody and always want to be kind and think good of everyone, but every small trouble that occurs is quickly straighten out by talking about it with the people involved as soon as possible.
Like:
she went to a country club but her married friend couldn’t join them so she insisted they find a chaperon or she could not stay to dine with them (what a bizarre thing, these conventions, it is okay for the two girls and the two boys to walk alone together and spend time together, but not to have lunch together…) and Herron secretly had a man dressed up as an old woman to play the part, and the man probably found and read a letter that Billee sent her, and asked her stuff about him. Then after Patty lent her a stole (with a secret letter inside) the ‘woman’ talked to Helen about Billee coming to New York… which caused a little trouble when Patty wrote about his impending visit to him, and he had only written about it in a letter that he had asked her not to open until he told her she could. This caused him to think she had opened it anyway and he half-scolded her for it, and she could not understand why.
Then Herron dared her to send a silly card to him for Valentine, and a young girl there convinced him to send one to her, and they were exactly the same - for a silly joke in the poem, she thought that he had returned her own card thus declaring he didn’t love her anymore, and he thought the same but only for a moment. When he managed to talk to her, he immediately talked to her about a marriage date, which made her happy and him too.
It is not explained the strange coincidence, other than by saying that it happen every year that some thing becomes so popular it is everywhere.
Herron told her of a ‘rumour’ that Billee had found there a pretty girl for himself, but she didn’t believe him and she was right.
During a brief visit, Billee gives her an envelope with important documents inside and she put it in a secret drawer, but then when Helen got lost in New York and spent the night at a woman’s house and she chatted the time away, letting it slip about the papers. For once the silly girl got her duty together and quickly called Patty to tell her to hide the papers elsewhere, really scared that the woman might have said something to some spies. Patty put them inside a photo album, right on time before a man came to search the house for them (with an excuse she didn’t believe, but no violence of any kind, luckily).
I rather think these documents got forgotten, since at the end Billee and Patty go abroad without them. Maybe it doesn’t matter, and they are supposed to stay hidden until useful.
Billee is sent abroad, and at first she thinks that she’ll only be a distraction to him, so she doesn’t want to go, and also it takes time to prepare the wedding she wanted, but when at the end the time comes to say goodbye she can’t do it. He hoped she cared that much, and had already called her parents to come.
They get married within the day and they go together.
All’s well that ends well.
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