“Why, how horrid! How utterly unsatisfactory! Nor their mothers?”
“No. And I’m still single, as you’re advised. And I’m not sure that the young gentlemen cared much more for me. If I had had a little more ‘gimp’ and verve, I might have equalled the particular young gentleman of whom we have been discoursing. But. …”
His obviously artificial style of speech concealed, as she guessed, some real feeling.
“Oh, if you insist on disparaging yourself … !”
“I was quite as coolly correct as I apprehend him to be; and if I could only have contrived to compass the charming, as well, who knows what—?”
“You don’t like my word. Is there a better, a more suitable?”
“No. You have the mot juste.”
He threw a finger through the wide pane of glass. “Is that the sort of thing you are after? Those boxes of pale gray are rather good.”
“I never buy from the show-window. Come in, and help me choose.”
“I love to shop,” he said, in a mock ecstasy. “With others,” he added. “I like to follow money in—and to contribute taste and experience.”
Over the stationer’s counter she said:
“Save Sunday. We are going out to the sandhills.”
“Thank you. Very well. Most glad to.”
“And you are to bring him.”
“Him?”
“Bertram Cope.”
“Why, I’ve given him six hours within two or three days. And now you’re asking me to give him sixteen.”
“Sixteen—or more. But you’re not giving them to him. You’re giving them to all of us. You’re giving them to me. The day is likely to be fine and settled, and I’d recommend your catching the 8:30 train. I shall have my full load in the car. And more, if I have to take along Helga. Try to reach us by one, or a quarter past.”
Mrs. Phillips had lately taken on a house among the sand dunes beyond the state line. This singular region had recently acquired so wide a reputation for utter neglect and desolation that—despite its distance from town, whether in miles or in hours—no one could quite afford to ignore it. Picnics, pageants, encampments and excursions all united in proclaiming its remoteness, its silence, its vacuity. Along the rim of ragged slopes which put a term to the hundreds of miles of water that spread from the north, people tramped, bathed, canoed, motored and weekended. Within a few seasons Duneland had acquired as great a reputation for prahlerische Dunkelheit—for ostentatious obscurity—as ever was enjoyed even by Schiller’s Wallenstein. “Lovers of Nature” and “Friends of the Landscape” moved through its distant and inaccessible purlieus in squads and cohorts. Everybody had to spend there at least one Sunday in the summer season. There were enthusiasts whose interest ran from March to November. There were fanatics who insisted on trips thitherward in January. And there were one or two super-fanatics—ranking ahead even of the fishermen and the sand-diggers—who clung to that weird and changing region the whole year through.
Medora Phillips’ house was several miles beyond the worst of the hurly-burly. There were no tents in sight, even in August. Nor was the honk of the motor-horn heard even during the most tumultuous Sundays. The spot was harder to reach than most others along the twenty miles of nicked and ragged brim which helped enclose the wide blue area of the Big Water, but was better worth while when you got there. Her little tract lay beyond the more prosaic reaches that were furnished chiefly in the light green of deciduous trees; it was part of a long stretch thickly set for miles with the dark and sombre green of pines. Our nature-lover had taken, the year before, a neglected and dilapidated old farmhouse and had made it into what her friends and habitués liked to call a bungalow. The house had been put up—in the rustic spirit which ignores all considerations of landscape and outlook—behind a well-treed dune which allowed but the merest glimpse of the lake; however, a walk of six or eight minutes led down to the beach, and in the late afternoon the sun came with grand effect across the gilded water and through the tall pine-trunks which bordered the zigzag path. Medora had added a sleeping porch, a dining-porch and a lean-to for the car; and she entertained there through the summer lavishly, even if intermittently and casually.
“No place in the world like it!” she would declare enthusiastically to the yet inexperienced and therefore the still unconverted. “The spring arrives weeks ahead of our spring in town, and the fall lingers on for weeks after. Come to our shore, where the fauna and flora of the whole country meet in one. All the wild birds pass in their migrations; and the flowers!” Then she would expatiate on the trailing arbutus in April, and the vast sheets of pale blue lupines in early June, and the yellow, sunlike blossoms of the prickly-pear in July, and the red glories of painter’s-brush and bittersweet and sumach in September. “No wonder,” she would say, “that they have to distribute handbills on the excursion-trains asking people to leave the flowers alone!”
“How shocking!” Cope had cried, with his resonant laugh, when this phase of the situation was brought to his attention. “Are the automobile people any better?”
Randolph had told him of some of the other drawbacks involved in the excursion. “It’s a long way to go, even when you pass up the trolley and make a single big bolt by train. And it leads through an industrial region that is mighty unprepossessing—little beauty until almost the end. And even when you get there, it may all seem a slight and simple affair for the time and trouble taken—unless you really like Nature. And lastly,” he said, with a sidelong glance at Cope, “you may find yourself, as the day wears on, getting a little too much of my company.”
“Oh, I hope that doesn’t mean,” returned Cope, with another ingenuous unchaining of his native resonance,
