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Forrest Holly's account of his proposed marriage to Jean Treadway of Bristol, Connecticut:

As the years progressed, years in my early twenties in the early nineteen forties, we corresponded regularly and exchanged our own spiritual growth, ideas and ideals, exchanges of thoughts and policies and ways and means, and experiences.

One very special occasion occurred when she and her family came to Ramona for a summer visit. I had proposed marriage to Jean Treadway of Bristol, Connecticut whom I later married. The scene was in what I called the Hermit House, my little one room cabin in Ramona, with a red steer hide for a carpet and beaver board lined walls, a galvanized iron roof outside with wall outside shingled. I was showing Elizabeth a letter in Mr Treadway's handwriting, a letter which was sort of telling me that he doubted if I could qualify to wed his daughter who had been reared in an aristocratic, conservative New England. I was thought audacious to even seek her hand, I living in a remote little California inland valley and where should Jean be there with me as a wife, she would surely live a sedentary existence. I had to look that word up for I did not know its meaning. It meant solitary, isolated, sterile, sort of, as I recall.

So Elizabeth read the letter out loud and I had studied his words as though they were unkind and authoritative and not understanding. Elizabeth finished reading and looking up at me said, “Why this letter is not so bad. Do you know that your own father took a similar stand about my Wally before we were married?” Now id there was anyone I loved and venerated it was my own father, a man who had just recently passed beyond the veil. I loved him dearly and respected him. What he had said and done I would say was above reproach. And here he had said to Wally what Mr Treadway was saying to me.

Previous to this moment I had held Mr Treadway in aversion as though he were a stubborn willed man, a calloused beast, self righteousness, and in a stupid rest, to paraphrase Mrs Eddy's poem “Sheppard Show Me How To Go.” surely he was all of those and I was the one unjustifiably impeded by him.

Well in that moment, when Elizabeth said my own father had taken a similar position with Wally, all the misconceptions about Mr Treadway fell away like a mist, and I suddenly beheld Mr T as a loving father interested in the welfare of his daughter, trying to make sure that she married someone worthy and entitled to her, one who qualified for her hand. All this reconception happened in a moment, and off fell the false concept I had of him. In that moment, my own thought was disclosed to me, oh it was I who had the stubborn will,the calloused breast, the self righteousness and was in stupid rest. And contrition, the depth of which I can feel to this moment dissolved all the false views of that dear man. I had lost in that moment and forever the false view of Mr Treadway. He and I have loved each other since and he is approaching his 89th birthday.

And I must add that a few months later, after viewing myself and my needs to be worthy of Jean to wife, when I put myself into discipline and efforts to prove myself, Mr Treadway lay down his newspaper at the breakfast table and said to Jean and her mother, “When we have the wedding for Jean and Forrest, we will have an awning over the front sidewalk should it rain.” That was the first time Jean knew, or her mother, that the marriage was now acceptable to Mr Treadway.

A made for TV movie about Forrest and Jean called What Love Sees was released in 1996.