Jerry
Jean Webster
Never before in the history of his connection with the Hotel du Lac had Gustavo encountered such a munificent, companionable, expansive, entertaining, ‘thoroughly’ unique and inexplicable guest Even the fact that he was American scarcely accounted for everything. Yesterday this guest had rung the bell and demanded a partner to play lawn tennis – as if the hotel kept partners laid away in drawers like so many sheets. The guest, Jerymn Hilliard, Jr., is unexpectedly at loose ends in tiny Valedolmo. He has seen all the ‘Baedeker’ sights already… Then he learns that in a rose-colored villa, surrounded with cypress and with a ‘terrazzo’ on the lake, lives another American – one with a daughter: a Signorina Constantina: ‘beautiful like the angels in Paradise,’Jean Webster (pseudonym for Alice Jane Chandler Webster) was an American writer and author of many books including Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy. Her best-known books feature lively and likeable young female protagonists who come of age intellectually, morally, and socially, but with enough humor, snappy dialogue, and gently biting social commentary to make her books palatable and enjoyable to contemporary readers.