Was it love? I had no doubt that it was. During the rest of the summer my scholarly mania for making plaster casts and spatter prints of Catskill flowers and leaves was all but surpassed by the constantly renewed impressions of Jessica that my mind served up to me for contemplation and delight.

Nothing in all the preceding years had had the power to bring me closer to a knowledge of profound sorrow than the breakup of camp, the packing away of my camp uniforms, the severing of ties with the six or ten people I had grown most to love in the world. In final separation from them, in the railroad terminal across the river from New York, I would nearly cry. My parents' welcoming arms would seem woeful, inadequate, unwanted. But that year was different, for just as the city, in the form of my street clothes, had intruded upon my mountain nights, so an essential part of the summer gave promise of continuing into the fall: Jessica and I, about to be separated not by a mere footbridge or mess-hall kitchen but by the immense obstacle of residing in cruelly distant boroughs, had agreed to correspond.

These letters became the center of my existence. I lived to see an envelope of hers in the morning mail and to lock myself in my room in the afternoon to reread her letter for the tenth time and finally prepare an answer. My memory has catalogued for easy reference and withdrawal the image of her pink, scented stationery and the unsloped, almost printed configurations of her neat, studious handwriting with which she invited me to recall our summer, so many sentences beginning with ``Remember when''; and others concerning camp friends who resided in her suburban neighborhood, and news of her commencing again her piano lessons, her private school, a visit to Boston to see her grandparents and an uncle who was a surgeon returned on furlough, wounded, from the war in Europe.