I

Jane Carver opened the screened door that led from the living-room of her father-in-law’s house at Gull Rocks, Seaconsit, to the verandah that commanded a view of the sea. She closed it quietly behind her and walked quickly over to the wooden steps that led down to the grassy terrace.

Fifteen years of matrimony had not impaired the lightness of Jane’s step. Her fine straight hair was still untouched with grey, her waist was still slender, and her eyes were still bright. They gleamed, now, with a spark of irritation. Had Mrs. Ward and Isabel been present they would have recognized, immediately, the storm signal. “Tantrum” would have been their verdict.

Jane stood still, for a moment, by a porch pillar and looked up at the vast assuaging reaches of blue sky beyond the green festoons and orange flowers of the trumpet vine. The sky was delightfully impersonal, thought Jane. Its very impersonality was vaguely comforting. With an acute sense of peril, momentarily escaped, Jane drew in a great breath of the warm sea-scented air. She was feeling better, already, just because of the sky and the sunshine and the soft sea-breeze and the tender waving tendrils of the trumpet vine.

If she had stayed in that living-room another minute, Jane knew she would have been rude to her mother-in-law. And Jane had never been that. Not really. Not once in fifteen years. But if she had listened once more to Mrs. Carver’s gentle expression of the pious hope, already reiterated three times since luncheon, that the good weather that they were now enjoying did not mean that it was going to rain during Stephen’s vacation, Jane knew her record would have been broken.

It was terrible, thought Jane, it was really terrible, what it did to her to listen to Stephen’s family talk about Stephen. And incomprehensible. For Jane loved Stephen. They were very happy together. Yet, somehow, when his mother⁠—

Oh, well, there was no use going into it. She had been knitting quietly by the living-room fire when Aunt Marie had observed that it was a pleasant afternoon for the race and Uncle Stephen had remarked that there was not much wind and Mrs. Carver had opened her mouth to reply. The pious hope had cast its shadow before. Jane had known what was coming. She had sprung to her feet and made good her escape.

It all seemed rather silly, now, as she looked back on it. Jane opened her knitting-bag and sat down on the top step in the sunshine.

A sunshot August haze hung over the familiar view of lawn and beach and bay. The Seaconsit harbour was filled with flitting sails. The Saturday afternoon race would begin in half an hour. Her father-in-law’s launch was riding at anchor, ready to follow the contestants around the course, and Jane could see her father-in-law, dapper in blue coat and white flannels, standing at the end of the pier, binoculars in hand. He was watching Alden and Silly, rounding the first flag in their catboat, already manoeuvring for position, half an hour ahead of the starting gun.

Mrs. Carver was watching them, too, Jane knew, from a living-room window, but without binoculars. On racing afternoons the binoculars became the passionate personal property of Mr. Carver. No one else would have thought of touching them.

Jane picked up her worsted and began to knit. She was making a blue sweater for her fourteen-year-old daughter, copying the shoulder pattern from the printed directions on the Mothers’ Page of The Woman’s Home Magazine. She spread the periodical on the porch floor beside her and bent placidly over her work. The sweater would be becoming to Cicily. When this one was finished, she would knit another for Jenny and a third for little Steve, much as he disliked being dressed to match his sisters. All three children were very blond. Like the Carvers, thought Jane, with a little sigh. When she looked up she could see her son’s yellow head bent over his pad and paintbox on the beach at the foot of the lawn and the stiff white contour of his trained nurse’s figure, stretched in the shadow of a rock at his side. Her daughters were nowhere to be seen. They were out in their Aunt Silly’s kennels, perhaps, playing with the cocker-spaniel puppy that she had given them.

It was very peaceful, alone on the verandah. And very quiet. Jane could hear the faint eternal ripple of the little lapping waves on the beach beyond the lawn, the insistent put-put of an unseen motorboat in the harbour and the mechanical tap of a woodpecker in the oak tree near the garden. The click of her own knitting-needles was the only other sound that broke the sunny silence.

It was pleasant to be alone. At Gull Rocks, Jane perversely reflected, one seldom was. The Carvers, as a family, were animated by the clan spirit. They did things, if at all, in concert. They even did nothing in concert. They abhorred solitude as nature does a vacuum.

Jane’s fingers were busy and her eyes were occupied, but her mind was not concerned with the work in hand. Quite mechanically she purled and plained and tossed the blue wool over her amber needles. She was thinking wise, thirty-six-year-old thoughts about the relative-in-law complex. “The relative-in-law complex” was the phrase that Jane herself had coined to account for the obvious injustice of her thoughts about Carvers. She was privately rather proud of it. The Freudian vocabulary was not yet a commonplace in the Western hemisphere, but Jane knew all about complexes and was vaguely comforted to feel herself in the grip of one that was undoubtedly authentic. There was nothing you could do about a complex. There it was⁠—like the shape of your nose. You had no moral responsibility for it and it innocently explained all the baser emotional reactions, of which, alone with your conscience, you were somehow subtly ashamed.

Jane was decidedly relieved to feel able to evade all moral responsibility for the emotions aroused in her breast by the constant society of Carvers. For, from any point of view but that of the enlightened Freudian, she could not but feel that they were distinctly unworthy. Even ridiculous. For years she had struggled against them. But emotions were strangely invincible. Ephemeral, however. That was a comfort. It was only when visiting at Gull Rocks, Seaconsit, that Jane fell a prey to the baser variety of which she was subtly ashamed. Safe at home with Stephen, in her little Colonial cottage in the suburbs of Chicago, Jane could always look back on the complications presented by life at Gull Rocks with a tolerant smile. Seen from that secure perspective, the congenital peculiarities of Carvers seemed always harmless, at times picturesque, and often pathetic. For ten months of the year they figured in her life as mere alien phenomena at which she marvelled detachedly, with easy amusement. In July and August they reared their sinister heads as dragons in her path.

Jane had spent July and August at Gull Rocks, Seaconsit, every summer but two since the birth of her first baby. The year that Steve was born, Stephen had gone East alone with their two little daughters. And the year after that Stephen had incredibly taken a three months’ vacation from the bank to make the grand tour of Europe, leaving the three children at home in the Colonial cottage in Mrs. Ward’s care. Twelve Julys and twelve Augusts at Gull Rocks, Seaconsit! When Jane put it like that, she really felt that she had joined the Holy Fellowship of Martyrs. Stephen didn’t know what it was like⁠—how could he, being born a Carver?⁠—marooned alone with the children at Gull Rocks summer after summer, while he held down his job at the bank at home and only came on to join them for a three weeks’ holiday. Stephen wanted his children brought up with some idea of the New England tradition. That was only natural, of course, still⁠—

However, Stephen was coming, that very afternoon, on the six o’clock train, for the three weeks’ holiday. Jane was very glad of that. Stephen’s coming would make everything much better. Gull Rocks was almost fun, when Stephen was there. They would swim with the children and Stephen would teach little Steve to sail and⁠—

Jane heard the screened door open behind her and the brisk, decided step of Aunt Marie crossing the piazza. She did not raise her head from her knitting.

“I’ve come out to keep you company,” said Aunt Marie pleasantly.

Jane made no comment. She was counting stitches again, softly, under her breath. She heard the Nantucket hammock at the corner of the verandah creak faintly under her aunt’s substantial weight.

“Have you read the August Atlantic?” asked Aunt Marie presently.

Jane shook her head in silence. She could hear the pages of the magazine flutter faintly in her aunt’s deliberate fingers.

“There’s a very good article in it,” continued Aunt Marie, in her pleasant practical New England voice, “by Cassandra Frothingham Perkins, on ‘The Decline of Culture.’ ”

“Twenty-three, twenty-four,” whispered Jane defensively. Then “Has it declined?” she asked. The innocence in her tone was not entirely ingenuous.

“Well, hasn’t it?” returned Aunt Marie very practically, as before. Then, after a pause, “You know who Cassandra Frothingham Perkins is, don’t you?”

“One of the Concord Perkinses,” said Jane, as glibly as a child responding with “1492” or “1066” to the question of a history teacher. She had not spent twelve summers at Gull Rocks, Seaconsit, in vain.

“She’s the daughter,” said Aunt Marie, “of Samuel Wendell Perkins, who wrote the Perkins biography of Emerson and Literary Rambles in Old Concord. The Atlantic publishes a lot of her stuff.”

“I’ve read it,” said Jane briefly. Who cared, she thought perversely, if culture had declined? But the question was purely rhetorical. For obviously Cassandra Frothingham Perkins did. And Aunt Marie Carver. All the Carvers, in fact. Nevertheless, the decline of culture was not a burning issue with Jane.

She bent her head again over the knitting directions in The Woman’s Home Magazine and her eye caught a flamboyant headline on the opposite page. “How Can We Keep Our Charm?” by Viola Vivasour. And below in explanatory vein, “Fifteen minutes a day devoted to Miss Vivasour’s simple formula of face creams solves woman’s eternal problem.” But Aunt Marie was again speaking.

“Cassandra’s made a little schedule,” she said. “She claims that fifteen minutes a day, spent reading the best books⁠—and she adds a little list of one hundred⁠—”

How much less important, thought Jane wickedly, the decline of culture than that of charm! Not, however, in the Carvers’ circle. There the significance of a five-foot bookshelf would always rise above that of a good cosmetic. The society of her relatives-in-law made Jane feel wantonly frivolous. She would just as soon read one article, she thought, or follow one recipe, as the other. Both equally absurd. Prepared for different publics⁠—that was all.

Jane heard the screened door open once more behind her and the heavy, slightly hesitant step of her mother-in-law crossing the piazza. She did not turn her head. Her hands still busy with her knitting, she gazed steadily out over the close-clipped lawn, pierced here and there with outcrops of granite rock, stretching smooth and green and freshly watered, three hundred feet before her, to where the coarser growth of beach grass, rooted in sandy soil, met the yellow fine of beach that fringed the blue expanse of sea. Jane loved the beach grass. It continued to exist in a state of nature, rooted in primeval sand, defeating the best efforts of the impeccable Portuguese gardener to impose on it an alien culture. There it was. The Carvers could do nothing about it. Jane wondered if her Aunt Marie had ever reflected that her Western niece-in-law was rather like the beach grass.

Mrs. Carver’s footsteps paused at her side.

“Dexter doesn’t think he can get me any lobster today, Jane.” Mrs. Carver’s voice was grave and just a trifle anxious. “Do you think Stephen would prefer bluefish or mackerel?”

“I don’t know,” said Jane.

“He’s so fond of sea food,” said Mrs. Carver.

Jane felt again that absurd surge of irritation. Stephen would never know what fish he was eating. Why fuss about it?

“I wanted to give him an old-fashioned shore dinner.”

The wistful note in the worried voice suddenly touched Jane’s heart. She looked up and met her mother-in-law’s anxious gaze. The fat, elderly face was creased in lines of vivid disappointment. Old age was pathetic, thought Jane, secure in the citadel of her thirty-six summers. Mothers were pathetic.

“I think he’d love mackerel,” she said warmly.

Mrs. Carver’s face brightened.

“I shall keep on trying for the lobster,” she said solemnly, “until the last minute.”

Suddenly Jane loved her mother-in-law. She loved her for the solemnity. It was touching and disarming. Why didn’t she always say the things that Mrs. Carver liked to hear? It was so easy to say them. She really must reform.

“Is that little Steve on the beach?” said Mrs. Carver.

“Yes,” said Jane.

“Don’t you think the sun is too hot for him?” asked Mrs. Carver.

“No,” said Jane.

“The glare’s very bright on those rocks,” said Mrs. Carver, “and Miss Parrot never seems to notice⁠—”

“The doctor said the sun was good for him,” said Jane tartly. Her moment of reform was short-lived.

“We can’t be too careful,” said Mrs. Carver.

They couldn’t be, of course. Why was she so perverse? Poor little Steve, pulled down, still, from his scarlet fever in June, still watched by his nurse, still worrying them all with that heart that wasn’t quite right yet, but would be, so the doctor said, by next spring!

“I think he ought to come into the shade,” said Mrs. Carver.

Jane rose abruptly and picked up the megaphone behind the hammock.

“Yoo-hoo!” she called. “Miss Parrot!” The white cap turned promptly in response to her call. “Bring Steve up, please!”

She sank on the steps again and picked up her knitting. She could see Miss Parrot’s slender starched figure rise from behind her rock. It assumed a slightly admonitory angle. Steve’s yellow head was raised from the sands in obvious protest.

“She doesn’t know how to manage children,” said Mrs. Carver.

Steve, pad and paintbox in hand, was wading through the beach grass, now, beside his nurse. His thin little voice could be heard, raised in inarticulate argument. Miss Parrot walked steadily on. Steve, reaching the smooth green turf of the lawn, paused to scratch a mosquito bite on his brown little knee.

“Why doesn’t she wait for him?” said Mrs. Carver.

“Oh, he’s all right,” said Jane. “He loves Miss Parrot.”

Mrs. Carver watched her grandson’s approach in silence.

“I don’t want to come up, Mumsy!” he cried. “I was painting the harbour.”

“Don’t run, dear,” said Mrs. Carver.

“You can finish your painting tomorrow,” said Jane.

“The light will be different, Mumsy!” His tanned little nine-year-old countenance was eager with protest.

“Mrs. Carver thinks the sun is too hot on the beach, Miss Parrot,” said Jane.

The trained nurse turned her pretty, pleasant face upon them with a tolerant smile.

“All righty!” she said. “Come on, Stevey, we’ll paint in the garden.”

“I don’t want to,” said Steve. He glared crossly at his grandmother.

Miss Parrot smiled again, throwing a glance of frank, professional understanding at the adults on the verandah.

“Oh, yes, you do,” she said easily. “If Grandma wants you to, Grandma’s the doctor!”

She disappeared around the corner of the house. Steve trailed aggrievedly after her. When he was irritated, reflected Jane, his little nine-year-old figure took on exactly the angle of that of her preposterous father-in-law. Mrs. Carver’s lips were slightly compressed. Jane knew what was coming.

“I don’t like that woman’s tone,” said Mrs. Carver.

“She’s a very good heart nurse,” said Jane.

“She has no proper deference,” said Mrs. Carver.

Jane’s lips, in their turn, were slightly compressed at the familiar phrase. Proper deference! That commodity that the Carvers sought in vain, throughout the world, looking for it, Jane thought, with the most pathetic optimism, in the most unlikely places. In the manners of Irish housemaids, on the lips of trained nurses, and in the emotional reactions of modern grandchildren. They never lost their simple faith that they ought to find it. That it was somehow owing to them. Was it, thought Jane curiously, because they were all over sixty? Or because they were Carvers? Stephen was a Carver, yet proper deference meant nothing in his life.

“Here comes Alden!” said Mrs. Carver suddenly. “Marie, are you ready?”

The figure of Mr. Carver had indeed deserted the pier and advanced to the beach grass. He was waving peremptorily. Aunt Marie rose from the Nantucket hammock a trifle hastily.

“I’ll get my sneakers,” she said, and vanished into the house.

“Now, where is your Uncle Stephen?” said Mrs. Carver. Jane, you’ll need your hat.” She was hurriedly swathing her own with a purple face veil.

“Didn’t you hear the horn?” called Mr. Carver. “I blew it twice.”

“We didn’t, dear,” said Mrs. Carver. “The wind’s offshore.”

“Jane, not much time,” said Mr. Carver. He took out his watch as he spoke. “It’s twenty minutes to three. Where are your rubber shoes?”

“I’ll get them,” said Jane. “They’re in my room.”

“Gall your Uncle Stephen,” said Mrs. Carver. “He’s working in the study.”

“I can’t see why you can’t all be ready at the proper time,” Jane heard her father-in-law observe as she crossed the porch. “I only keep up the launch for the pleasure of the family.” The screened door banged behind her. She crossed the living-room with an air of extreme deliberation. What a ridiculous old man Mr. Carver was! Domestic dictator! Why didn’t they all revolt? Why hadn’t they all revolted, years ago, long before she came into the family?

Jane paused before the living-room chimneypiece to kick, vindictively, a smouldering log back into the ashes and place the screen before the dying fire. Always this fuss about nothing, every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon, at twenty minutes to three! That launch! The Whim! Ironic name! It ought to be called The Duty, The Responsibility, The Obligation. Or perhaps, like a British dreadnought, The Invincible. It was invincible, when manned by Mr. Carver. Those Wednesday and Saturday races! That sacred necessity of following them, twice every week, out of the harbour and into the bay, around the three buoys and home. Watching those ridiculous catboats with Alden and Silly at the helm of one, appraising the wind, discussing the course, commending the seamanship. No one cared to go⁠—except Mr. Carver. Take today when Mrs. Carver wanted to telephone for lobsters and Aunt Marie to read the Atlantic and Uncle Stephen to work in the study and she just to be let alone for a quiet afternoon, to finish Cicily’s sweater and think of Stephen’s arrival. No one ever cared to go, really⁠—except the children. And they couldn’t because they made Mrs. Carver nervous, climbing around the boat, and Mr. Carver irritated, ever since little Steve had dropped the compass and broken the glass and spilled the alcohol all over the varnished table in the cabin.

“I only keep up the launch,” thought Jane in resentful retrospect, as she crossed the hall, “for the pleasure of the family.” What bunk! It was really Mrs. Carver’s fault, of course. She should have taken him in hand just as soon as she married him. Her weakness was his strength. She’d made him what he was today and the rising generations had to suffer for her folly. Stephen might have been like that if he had married a woman like his own mother. There was lots of “Carver” in Stephen. Jane knew she had been good for him. All the Wards had been good for him. Her father in one way, and her mother, and even Isabel, in quite another. The West had been good for him. Jane paused at the living-room door.

“Uncle Stephen?” she said.

The elderly professor was seated at his brother’s mahogany secretary, bent over a little pile of manuscript. He did not hear her.

“Uncle Stephen!” said Jane again.

Her uncle raised his shiny bald head abruptly. His big blue eyes looked mildly up at her over his gold-rimmed spectacles. His face was very fat and round and pink and his head was very spherical and almost hairless. In spite of his white moustache, Jane always thought he looked just like a good-natured baby. Uncle Stephen was always good-natured and Jane was very fond of him. He didn’t seem at all like a Carver. Was that perhaps because of Aunt Marie, the indomitable daughter of “the great Nielson,” with whom he had been united in matrimony for more than forty years? Aunt Marie seemed so much more like a Carver than Uncle Stephen himself. There was a subtle warning in that thought, reflected Jane. In patiently eradicating, throughout a long lifetime, the more disagreeable traits of a husband, did a wife herself acquire them?

But Uncle Stephen’s pleasant pink old face had assumed a guilty expression.

“Good Lord, Janie!” he said regretfully. “Is it twenty minutes to three?”

“You bet it is,” said Jane briefly. And her eyes met those of her uncle in a twinkle of understanding. Jane never discussed Carvers with Carvers, but she knew just how Uncle Stephen felt about The Whim. Fumbling a little in his haste, he began to put away his manuscripts in a shabby brown briefcase.

“I wanted to finish these notes,” he said helplessly, “but⁠—”

“What are you doing?” asked Jane. The activities of Uncle Stephen at Gull Rocks were always refreshing. Jane thought scholarship a trifle amusing. Impersonal, however, and assuaging, like the blue sky. Uncle Stephen’s conversation could always be counted on to rise above the domestic plane.

“A monograph,” he said meekly, “on the Letters of William Wycherley, for the Modern Language Society. His correspondence with Alexander Pope.”

“I thought Wycherley wrote plays,” said Jane vaguely. In spite of the early exhortations of Miss Thomas, the details of a Bryn Mawr education were fast fading from her memory.

“He did, my dear,” said Uncle Stephen. “Good plays and bad poems and very bad letters.”

“Then why write monographs on them?” asked Jane.

“They are interesting,” said Uncle Stephen, rising from his chair, “because they stimulated Pope to reply.”

“Then why not write on Pope’s answers?”

“That has been done, my dear.”

Jane felt that the mysteries of scholarship were beyond her.

“Pope was very fond of him,” said Uncle Stephen, as they turned toward the door. “He said ‘the love of some things rewards itself, as of Virtue and of Mr. Wycherley.’ ”

As she mounted the stairs in search of her rubber shoes, Jane wished that she were a scholar. Scholarship would be a resource at Gull Rocks. She wished that she were capable of generating a passionate interest in the thoughts of Alexander Pope on Virtue and Mr. Wycherley. She wished that she were capable of generating a passionate interest in almost anything that would serve to pass the time. On the landing she met Miss Parrot.

“Mrs. Carver,” said the trained nurse. Her voice was pleasant but a trifle cool.

“Yes,” said Jane.

“I wanted to speak to you again about Steve’s diet,” said Miss Parrot. “His grandmother will keep on giving him too much sugar. He had three tablespoons on his raspberries at luncheon. I can’t convince her it won’t build him up⁠—”

“I’ll speak to her,” said Jane. She turned to mount the stairs.

“And Mrs. Carver⁠—”

“Yes,” said Jane, pausing again on the third step above the landing.

“I’ll have to speak to you again about my supper tray. The desserts⁠—last night the cook sent me up only three prunes. I thought you’d like to know.”

“Oh, I love to know!” thought Jane. But⁠—“I’m sorry, Miss Parrot,” she said. “I’ll see about it.”

“And Mrs. Carver⁠—Madam Carver spoke to me again about using the back stairs. I’m not a servant, Mrs. Carver.”

“You’re a guest, Miss Parrot,” said Jane, “as I am myself. You’ll have to use whatever stairs Madam Carver asks you to.”

Miss Parrot’s pretty lips were firmly compressed. Jane looked at her in silence. She was a very good heart nurse. Jane fell a prey to inner panic.

“Please be patient, Miss Parrot,” she said weakly. “It won’t be for long now.”

“I shall use the front stairs,” said Miss Parrot firmly. And turned to descend them.

Jane mounted to her room in silence. At thirty-six life was terrible, she thought, as she pulled on her rubber shoes. It had no dignity. It wasn’t at all what you expected, when you were young. Youth wasn’t dignified, of course, but it was simple, it was joyous, it was expectant. In youth life seemed⁠—important. The things you thought about were important, no matter how inadequately you thought about them. But later you found yourself involved in a labyrinth of trifles. Worrying, ridiculous trifles. Things that didn’t matter, yet had to be coped with. And you’d lost that sustaining sense that, at any moment, something different might be going to happen. At thirty-six you found yourself a buffer state between the older generation and the younger. You had to keep your son’s trained nurse and you had to keep the peace with your mother-in-law. Did Miss Parrot think she liked to live with Mrs. Carver? Did Mrs. Carver think she liked to live with Miss Parrot? If she could live with both of them, Jane thought, they might at least succeed in living with each other for two brief months⁠—

“Jane!” It was the voice of her mother-in-law, raised in anxious protest from the terrace below her window. “What are you doing, dear? The launch is waiting!”

Jane snatched up a hat and ran from her room. She dashed down the stairs. Oh, well! Stephen was coming that evening. They would go home in three weeks. Miss Parrot was a good heart nurse. She took all the responsibility. And Steve was much better. Gull Rocks had done a lot for him. The sun and the sea air. Her mother-in-law was pathetic. She couldn’t really help Mr. Carver. And Stephen was coming.

Jane banged the screened door and overtook Mrs. Carver on the path to the pier. She slipped her hand through her plump arm.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was talking to Miss Parrot.”

“What about?” asked Mrs. Carver.

“She was telling me she didn’t like prunes,” said Jane, laughing.

“Did she think that you cared?” inquired Mrs. Carver with acerbity.

“Yes. But she was wrong!” Jane dropped her mother-in-law’s arm and stooped to pluck a handful of sweet fern from among the beach grass. The grey-green petals, wrenched from the fibrous stem, exhaled a pungent perfume. Jane buried her nose in them. They were very sweet and warm from the sun. She ran lightly ahead of her mother-in-law out onto the pier.

Mr. Carver was standing on the float, his watch in his hand. He looked severely at her from under his straw hat-brim.

“Quickly, now,” said Mr. Carver.

Jane sprang from the float to the boat. Aunt Marie was seated in a canvas deck chair. Her ankles looked thick and her small, wide feet very flat and stubby in her white sneakers. She had brought the August Atlantic with her. Jane knew she wouldn’t be allowed to read it. Uncle Stephen was sitting on the little varnished bench along the rail. He looked more like a baby than ever, thought Jane, in his round canvas boating hat. A semicircle of pink scalp showed under its floppy brim in the rear. Mr. Carver was carefully handing his wife up over the little landing-ladder. Her feet fumbled on the rubber treads and she clung a trifle nervously to his blue serge sleeve.

“We may be in time yet,” said Mr. Carver quite happily. Then, with severity, “The starting gun is late.” His tone implied that starting guns were not what they used to be. In the days when he was president of the Seaconsit Yacht Club⁠—

Jane, perched on the rail, her rubber-shod feet upon the varnished bench, suddenly realized that she was laughing aloud. Carvers were pathetic. They were all over sixty. They didn’t know how funny they were. Jane felt distinctly sorry for them. To a discerning daughter-in-law they didn’t really matter.

One white-clad sailor was pulling up the ladder. Another was standing by to push off the launch. Mr. Carver had taken his seat at the wheel. His shrivelled little New England face, with its grey Vandyke beard, was turned sideways and upward, estimating the weather.

“Not much wind,” he said.

The whir of the gasoline engine increased in volume, then quieted suddenly to a steady purr. The water widened between the launch and the pier. Jane turned to watch the catboats, veering and tacking now, around the first buoy. Suddenly she heard the gun. Mr. Carver rose from his seat, still holding the wheel, to observe the start. Alden and Silly were well in the rear. That was too bad, thought Jane. She had long ago decided that, all things considered, it was preferable to listen to Alden talking all evening of how he had won a race than of how he had lost one.

II

“If the wind hadn’t dropped at the second buoy,” said Alden, “we should have come in third.”

“You made a mistake,” said Mr. Carver, “splitting tacks on the second leg.”

“We only missed that puff by four seconds,” said Silly.

“But you missed it,” said Mr. Carver.

“That was a matter of luck,” said Alden.

“Exactly,” said Mr. Carver. “I’m talking of the science of seamanship.”

Jane, busy again with her knitting before the living-room fire, was not bothering to listen. It was just the same sort of talk she had heard at Gull Rocks every Wednesday and Saturday evening of July and August for the last twelve years. Sometimes she listened. Sometimes she even joined in the argument. But tonight she was watching Stephen over her amber knitting-needles in silence.

Stephen, settled in a chintz-covered armchair, with his daughter Cicily on a stool at his feet, was following the conversation of the assembled Carvers with interest. He was sailing the race over again with Alden and Silly. Jane knew he knew every rock in the harbour, every trick of the summer breeze that blew over the blue waters of the bay. In spite of the animation of his face, he seemed tired and very much in need of his holiday. Surrounded by the tanned yachtsmen he looked strangely white. The flesh under his eyes was just a little puffy and there was a new drawn line that Jane had never seen before around one corner of his mouth. Stephen had been very busy working over that bank merger. It had been a hot summer in the West.

Stephen didn’t have much fun, thought Jane. With a sudden pang she realized that he looked his forty-four years. His curly, blond hair had receded over his temples and was streaked with grey above the ears. The temples were rather shiny and the hair was growing perilously thin⁠—considering Uncle Stephen and the forces of heredity⁠—in a small circular area at the top of his head. His grey sack suit was just a little wrinkled after a hot afternoon in a New England train. Yes⁠—Stephen looked just like what he was⁠—the forty-four-year-old first vice-president of the Midland Loan and Trust Company, badly in need of his summer vacation.

Men drew the short straw in the lottery of life, reflected Jane, as she looked at him. Men like Stephen, at least. Miss Thomas had claimed it was a man-made world. If so, men had certainly made it with a curious disregard of their own comfort and convenience. How terrible to have to be the first vice-president of a bank and work eight hours a day for forty years at a mahogany desk in the executive offices of the Midland Loan and Trust Company and never have more than a three weeks’ holiday! Why did men do it? When the world was so wide and so full of a number of things and they didn’t really have to marry to⁠—to enjoy themselves.

Wives didn’t appreciate husbands. Ridiculous for her to carry on so about just having to live in idleness with the Carvers⁠—who were, after all, quite harmless⁠—at Gull Rocks⁠—which was, after all, very pretty⁠—for two brief months every summer, while Stephen⁠—

“It wasn’t luck,” said Mr. Carver, “that you had to concede the right of way to the Uncateena. If you hadn’t been on the port tack, she would have had to give you room around the mark.”

“We shouldn’t have been on the port tack,” said Alden stubbornly, “if the wind hadn’t shifted.”

“I think the winds are so uncertain this time of year,” put in Mrs. Carver pacifically.

It was really pretty terrible to have to listen to them, thought Jane. Day in and day out. Perhaps it was worse than being the first vice-president of a bank. Men never had to listen to what bored them. Or did they? A sudden recollection of Stephen’s patient face across the candlelight at her father’s dinner-table rose in Jane’s mind. Stephen, listening to her mother and Isabel. Robin, listening to her mother and Isabel. Her father, listening to her mother and Isabel. The patient “Oh, all right, Lizzie!” that had terminated, since her earliest memory, so many of the Wards’ domestic discussions.

Perhaps people were all bored most of the time after they were thirty-six, thought Jane. Perhaps being bored was just a part of growing up and growing old. The excitement went out of things. Life no longer had a surprise up its sleeve. But still, after you were thirty-six, you went on living for another thirty-six years or so. Living and thinking about annoying trifles.

Why had Stephen, at twenty-two, wanted to be a banker? Why had Stephen, at twenty-nine, wanted, so desperately, to marry her? Why did he want, now, after fifteen years, to go on working at that mahogany desk, to protect the interests of the Midland Loan and Trust Company and support his wife and three children? Why did he want to waste the pathetic brevity of his three weeks’ holiday at Gull Rocks every summer, when the world was full of beautiful, bewildering places that he would never see and life might be full of strange exotic experiences that he would never know? What kept men faithful, throughout a long lifetime, to the banks and the wives they had embraced in early manhood? The sense of duty? The force of habit? The hands of their children, perhaps.

Jane looked at her fourteen-year-old daughter. Her young tanned face alight with enthusiasm, Cicily was sailing the race over, too, but rather with her father in a phantom catboat than with her aunt and uncle in the prosaic vessel now riding at its moorings beyond the pier. Cicily adored Stephen. And Stephen adored Cicily. In his eyes she could do no wrong. She could not even sit up too late. Jane knew she should have been in bed an hour ago. The other children had gone upstairs at eight.

“Cicily,” she said, “it’s ten o’clock.”

“But tonight’s Saturday,” said Stephen quickly. It was a family joke. Whatever night it was was always his excuse for letting Cicily sit up ten minutes longer.

“Yes, tonight’s Saturday, Mumsy!” echoed the child. “And it’s Daddy’s first evening.”

Jane smiled indulgently. It was very difficult not to smile indulgently at Cicily and Stephen.

“You heard your mother,” said Mr. Carver with severity.

The child rose reluctantly from her stool. She looked reproachfully at Jane, with Stephen’s eyes and Stephen’s smile. “Why stir up Grandfather?” her glance said, plainer than words. She looked a trifle mutinous and very pretty, with her cheeks flushed in the firelight and her crisply curly fair hair a little loosened from the bow at her neck.

“Good night,” said Stephen, as she kissed his bald spot.

“Good night,” said Jane, as her lips met her daughter’s smooth cheek. As she stooped for the caress, the child’s fair hair streamed over her mother’s shoulder.

“Melisande!” laughed Stephen.

“I want to put it up,” said Cicily. “I’m fourteen and a half.”

“Picnic tomorrow!” said Stephen, as his daughter turned toward the door. Her face lit up as she threw him a smile over her smocked shoulder. “That child’s growing up,” said Stephen, as she vanished into the hall.

III

Jane sat at her dressing-table, brushing the long straight strands of her brown hair, looking critically at her reflection in the glass as she did so. For more than a year, now, Jane had been endeavouring to think of herself as “middle-aged.” On the momentous occasion of her thirty-fifth birthday she had said firmly to Stephen, “Middle-age is from thirty-five to fifty.” But curiously enough, in spite of that stoical statement, Jane had continued, incorrigibly, to think of herself as “young.” In this soft light, thought Jane dispassionately, in her new pink dressing-gown, she really did not look old. And she was prettier at thirty-six than she had been at twenty. No, not that, exactly. The freshness was gone. But prettier for thirty-six than she had been for twenty. At twenty everyone was pretty, and most girls had been, after all, much prettier than she. But at thirty-six⁠—Jane smiled engagingly at her reflection⁠—she held her own with her contemporaries.

At thirty-six the trick was not so much to look pretty as to look young. Beauty helped, of course, but not as much as youth. And she was still slim and agile and not grey and⁠—but what difference did it make, anyway? It didn’t make any difference at all, thought Jane solemnly, unless, like Flora, you were still unmarried, or, like Muriel, though married, you went on collecting infatuated young men.

What use had Jane, in the Colonial cottage in the Chicago suburb, for youth or beauty or any other intriguing quality? Looking young didn’t help you to preside over the third-grade mothers’ meeting in the Lakewood Progressive School. Looking beautiful didn’t help you to keep your cook through a suburban winter. There was Stephen, of course. But wasn’t it Stephen’s most endearing quality⁠—or was it his most irritating?⁠—that for ten years or more Stephen had never really thought about how she looked at all? To Stephen Jane looked like Jane. That was enough for him.

The attitude was endearing, of course, when you looked a fright. When you were having a baby, or trying to get thin after nursing one, or hadn’t been able to afford a new evening gown, or suddenly realized that you looked a freak in the one you had afforded. In crises of that nature it was always very comforting to reflect that Stephen would never notice. But in other crises⁠—when the baby was a year old and you weighed a hundred and thirty pounds again and you had bought a snappy little hat that⁠—or even when you were sitting in front of your dressing-table in a soft light and a new pink dressing-gown, waiting for Stephen to stop gossiping with his mother and come up to join you⁠—it was irritating to reflect that, no matter what you did, to Stephen you would always look exactly as you always had. That you would look like Jane.

Jane put down her hairbrush with a sigh of resignation and selected a new pink hair-ribbon from her dressing-table drawer. She tied it carefully in a bow above her pompadour and, picking up a hand glass, turned to admire the effect in the mirror. She wished her hair were curly. Suddenly the frivolity of that immemorial wish and the sight of the flat satin hair-ribbon and the long strands of straight hair made Jane think of André. Of André and of being fourteen. Of Flora’s red-gold tresses and Muriel’s seven dark finger curls. Of André’s resolute young face and the shy, unspoken admiration in his eloquent young eyes. Funny that just the sight of a hair-ribbon should make her feel his presence so vividly. Should so recall that funny little warm, happy feeling, deep down inside, that was so integral a part of being fourteen and loving André and never feeling quite sure of how he felt about her in return.

André. André was a bridegroom now. Four months a bridegroom. Jane wished she had written to him, as she almost had, that day last spring when she had found his picture in the May copy of Town and Country in Muriel’s living-room. But it had seemed absurd to break a silence of fifteen years’ duration just because she had seen a snapshot, from the camera of the Associated Press, of André, with averted head and raised silk hat, resplendent in bridal finery, hastening through the classic portico of the Madeleine with a vision in floating tulle on his arm. A vision reported to be, in the legend beneath the snapshot. Mademoiselle Cyprienne Pyramel-Gramont, daughter of the Comte et Comtesse Jean Pyramel-Gramont. “Noted Sculptor Weds” had been the caption.

André was a noted sculptor. One of France’s most distinguished sons. Eight years ago, on the occasion of her memorable trip abroad with Stephen, Jane had come suddenly on his Adam in the corridors of the Tate Gallery. Stephen had called her attention to it. He had noticed it because it was double-starred in Baedeker. “This can’t be your Duroy,” he had said.

Later his Eve had met Jane’s eye with an enigmatic smile over her yet untasted apple, in the entrance of the Luxembourg. An Eve still innocent, but subtly provocative. Jane had regarded her with wistful interest. What had André said in the postscript of his long explanatory letter⁠—Jane had never forgotten⁠—“There is something of you in all my nymphs and Eves and saints and Madonnas?” And what was Stephen saying at the moment? “Golly, she smiles like you, Jane! He never got over you!”

“Well, why should he?” she had retorted lightly. But her mind was still busy with the postscript. “Something you brought into my life. Romance, I guess. Nothing more tangible.”

She had brought romance into André’s life, as they walked up the Lake Shore Drive together, with their schoolbooks under their arms. He was achieving its fulfilment, now with this French Cyprienne, in exotic settings that Jane could not even imagine. André was thirty-eight. Yet André was a bridegroom, while she, Jane, was a settled suburban housewife and the middle-aged mother of a fourteen-year-old daughter and an eleven-year-old daughter and a nine-year-old son. Jane felt devoutly grateful that the Atlantic rolled between them. That André would never see her again. That he would think of her, always, as she looked in a hair-ribbon, while Cyprienne had babies and grew old and came to look only like Cyprienne. But Cyprienne wouldn’t grow so very old, thought Jane almost resentfully, while André lived to see her. Cyprienne, under the floating tulle, hadn’t looked a day over eighteen. Four years older than Cicily, perhaps, and bewitchingly pretty. Sixteen-year-old André, a middle-aged Frenchman with a child bride!

Jane shivered as she thought of it. Men should marry when they were young. André should have married when he loved her. But if he had he would never have become one of France’s most distinguished sons. Chicago would have stifled him. André might have been a banker by this time, thought Jane, if he had taken her on at nineteen. And he had had the sense to foresee it. His abrupt departure from her life had been much in the romantic tradition established by Romeo in the balcony window. His alternatives had been the same. “I must be gone and live, or stay and die!”

But she had married young. And Stephen had been young when she married him. They had had together those ridiculous, unthinking, heartbreaking years of almost adolescent domesticity, with two babies in the sand pile and another in the perambulator and a contagious disease sign often on the front door and a didy always on the clothesline! They’d had all that. But had they really had romance? Romance, such as she’d known with André? Stephen had had it, perhaps, in the first years of their marriage. But⁠—had she? Hadn’t she always been rather afraid of romance, all those young years when it might have been hers for the taking? Did a woman ever really value romance until she felt it slipping away from her? Wasn’t that the surest sign of all of being middle-aged? You might be still slim and agile and not grey, but when you felt that wistful, almost desperate impulse to live your life to the full before it was over, didn’t it really mean that it was over, that youth, at any rate, was over, that it was too late to recapture the glamour that you saw only in retrospect⁠—

But this was ridiculous, thought Jane. Life wasn’t over at thirty-six. She loved Stephen and Stephen loved her. He had never looked at another woman. Anything they wanted was theirs for the taking. Their personal relationship was only what they made it. She must say to Stephen, “Look at me, Stephen! Really look at me! You haven’t for ten years!” And he would laugh⁠—of course he always laughed at her⁠—

That was Stephen’s step on the stair.

Jane looked quickly about the bedroom. Yes, it was very neat. Mrs. Carver was an excellent housekeeper and Jane herself was always tidy. Her underclothes were meticulously folded on a chair by the dressing-table and the linen sheets of the twin four-poster mahogany beds were turned smoothly down over the rose-coloured comforters. Stephen’s clean blue pajamas were folded on his pillow.

As he opened the door, Jane rose from her mirror to meet him. He stood a moment on the threshold, smiling contentedly around the lamplit room. Dear old Stephen⁠—even in the soft light he still looked white and jaded. Jane walked slowly over to him.

“Glad to be here?” she smiled up into his eyes.

“You bet!” said Stephen fervently.

“I’m glad you’ve come,” said Jane.

Stephen closed the door.

“How’s it been?” said Stephen. “Family been bothering you?”

“Oh, no,” said Jane.

Stephen slipped off his grey sack coat and hung it carefully over the back of a chair.

“It’s a pretty good old place,” said Stephen. He walked over to the window in his shirtsleeves and peered out into the darkness beyond the screen.

“Smell that sea-breeze,” said Stephen. He snuffed the briny air luxuriously for a moment in silence.

“Put out the lamp,” said Stephen. “The moon’s just rising over the bay.”

Smiling a little, Jane pushed the button and walked blindly over to him in the darkness. She slipped her arm though his. The brown film of screen had grown suddenly transparent. The lawn and beach and harbour were flooded with silver light. The waning moon swung low in the eastern sky. Jane gazed in silence as small objects on the lawn slowly took form and substance in the unearthly radiance. The outcrops of granite rock cast clear-cut shadows on the greyish grass. The weather beaten outline of a clump of stunted cedars at the foot of the pier stood out in black silhouette against the silver waters of the harbour. The slender mast of the catboat rocked uneasily at its moorings. A lighthouse winked, deliberately, far out in the bay. One white flash and two red. Jane could hear the little harbour waves, quite distinctly, as they rippled on the shingle. Then the faint moaning of the bell-buoy that marked the hidden reef beyond the point. Jane pressed her cheek gently against Stephen’s arm.

“I’m very glad you’ve come,” she said.

Stephen turned his head abruptly. Her voice seemed to rouse him from revery.

“I guess it was time,” he said cheerfully. “Mother seems a bit on edge.”

Jane dropped his arm. She moved away from him in the square of moonlight that fell through the casement.

“What about?” she asked.

“Oh⁠—nothing much,” said Stephen still cheerfully. Then, after a moment, “Don’t you think, Jane, you could persuade Miss Parrot to use the back stairs?”

Jane moved in silence back to her dressing-table. She switched on the light abruptly and sat down on her chair.

“I’ve said all I could,” said Jane. “You know how Miss Parrot is. She’s an awfully good heart nurse. I don’t want to rock the boat.”

Stephen untied his necktie and removed his collar in silence. He walked slowly across the room to place them on top of his chest of drawers. Jane watched him in her mirror. Suddenly she caught the gleam of irritation in her own eyes. She gazed steadily at her reflection until it faded into a twinkle of amusement.

“Stephen,” she said resolutely, wheeling round in her chair, “don’t talk about Miss Parrot.”

“All right,” said Stephen, “I won’t.” He was unbuttoning his waistcoat a trifle absentmindedly. “How’s the weather been? Good sailing breeze, all month?” As he spoke he turned to smile at her. Jane regarded him steadily. Poor old Stephen⁠—he looked very tired. As for herself, from the nature of his smile Jane knew what she looked like. There was absolutely nothing to be done about it. She looked like Jane.

IV

“I’d go, if I were you,” said Silly.

“It’s only for a week, of course,” said Jane.

“The children will be all right with Miss Parrot,” said Silly.

“Oh, yes,” said Jane. “It’s just moving them back West.”

“Stephen can do that,” said Silly.

They were lying side by side in the shadow of a rock on the sands of Pine Island. Two weeks of Stephen’s precious holiday had already passed. The litter of a picnic luncheon defiled the beach at their feet. A few yards away little Steve, in his scarlet bathing-suit, was digging a canal in the wet brown sand where the waves were breaking. Cicily and Jenny were tossing a baseball back and forth, a little farther down the beach. Stephen and Alden, leaning back against a boulder, were enjoying their after-luncheon cigarettes and discussing the hilarities of the twenty-fifth reunion of the Class of ’88, which Alden had superintended at Cambridge the preceding June.

“And on Sunday,” said Alden, with a reminiscent chuckle, “we had an excursion by steamer to Gloucester. Some excursion! More liquid in the bar than in the bay!”

“I’d go,” repeated Silly. “I’d do whatever I wanted to, whenever I could.”

On Silly’s lips the simple statement took on a wistful significance. Jane’s absent eyes had been fixed on her unconscious children. She turned, now, to contemplate her sister-in-law. Silly’s long angular frame was carelessly clothed in a weather-beaten brown tweed skirt and sun-streaked tan sweater. A dilapidated brown felt hat of Alden’s was pulled well down over her forehead to protect her eyes from the glare. Her clean white sport shirt was buttoned mannishly about her neck, and a diamond horseshoe pin, which had been Mr. Carver’s generous gesture on the occasion of her forty-fifth birthday, was negligently thrust through her orange tie. It twinkled, inappropriately, in the brilliant sunshine. She lay flat on her back on the beach, gazing up at the silver clouds that floated in the stainless August sky. A queer weather-beaten figure curiously akin to the rocks and the sands and the clumps of stunted pine trees that gave the island its name. A pathetic figure and, strangely enough, it seemed to Jane, a beautiful one at the moment. The rough outline of tweed and worsted could not conceal the Diana-like grace of Silly’s lank body, nor mar the delicacy of her slender ankles nor the strength of her slim wrists nor the angular beauty of her long, lean hands. Jane peeped under the turned-down hat-brim. Silly might boast the body of a goddess, but her face was uncompromisingly that of a forty-six-year-old New England spinster. Plain, tanned, and austere, it was set in its familiar lines of controlled resignation.

When had Silly ever done what she wanted to, thought Jane? Never since Jane had known her. For the last fifteen years, as all the Carvers knew quite well, Silly had wanted to do only one thing. To break away from the family and the place at Gull Rocks and the house on Beacon Street and buy a little stone-strewn farm at Topsfield, Massachusetts, and keep cocker-spaniel kennels there with Susan Frothingham. Susan was now forty-eight. For the last fifteen years, she had wanted to break away from the Frothinghams on Arlington Street and live with Silly on a Topsfield hilltop. Jane saw no charms in Susan. A fat, uninteresting New England old maid, if there ever was one. Still⁠—if Silly liked her and she liked Silly⁠—it was dreadful what life did to single women. What families did to single women. Well-to-do families, throwing destitute middle-aged daughters an occasional diamond horseshoe, but denying them the right to independence. The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

“If you want to go to New York to see Agnes,” pursued Silly, still gazing at the silver cloud, “I think you ought to go.”

“Your mother won’t like to have Stephen take the children back West alone,” said Jane.

“I’m tired of seeing the men in this family considered!” said Silly with sudden violence. “I’d like to see one of the women get her innings for a change.”

“Oh, I never consider Stephen much,” said Jane honestly. “And I get plenty of innings.”

“Well, this is an outing,” smiled Silly. “How long since you’ve seen Agnes?”

“Oh, mercy!” said Jane. “Ever so long! Seven years. Not since she married. The last time I saw her was when she came West for her father’s funeral.”

“I think you ought to go,” repeated Silly. “Mother won’t care as long as you’re going to meet Flora.”

That was probably true, thought Jane. The bond between Mrs. Carver and her brother was a very close one. Flora and Mr. Furness were on the water now, returning from a summer in England. Whatever Mrs. Carver might think of the folly of a headstrong daughter-in-law who deserted her husband and children to spend a week in New York for the purpose of seeing an old Bryn Mawr classmate, she would consider it a very suitable attention for Stephen’s wife to meet his uncle and cousin on the dock at Hoboken, bearing appropriate greetings from the Boston connection.

Not that Jane cared particularly about meeting Flora. She had seen her in Chicago at Easter and would see her again there in two weeks at the very latest. But the Furnesses’ arrival did make a plausible pretext for a trip to New York, and Jane did care, terribly, about being with Agnes again for a few days and seeing her five-year-old daughter and meeting the gentleman whom Jane had always privately characterized as “that dreadful husband.”

In Jane’s opinion, Agnes had ruined her life by marrying Jimmy Trent. She never understood how it could have happened. Levelheaded Agnes, at the great age of thirty-one, with a reputation really established as a writer of short stories, with one good novel published and a better one half-finished, had succumbed to the incomprehensible charm of a ne’er-do-well journalist, hanging about the outskirts of the newspaper world of New York, three years younger than Agnes and perfectly incapable of holding down a lucrative job for more than two months at a time. When Jane considered Agnes as she had been in college, the marriage was really incredible. Agnes, on a Bryn Mawr window-seat, the level head triumphantly crowned with a wreath of potted ivy, saying seriously, “I’m not at all romantic. I just want to accomplish.”

One moment of romance had ruined for Agnes ten years of accomplishment. The baby had come at once, of course, and the second novel had never been finished. After a year or two of living in boardinghouses and trying to subsist on Jimmy’s nonexistent income, Agnes had abandoned her writing and had taken a job in the advertising department of Macy’s. It was a good job, she had written Jane very cheerfully, at the time. She liked advertising. On the whole, she liked it better than writing. They had taken a nice little flat in Greenwich Village and little Agnes was established in a play school at the age of three and Jimmy did a little writing, now and then, mainly musical criticism, and worked with his fiddle, which amused him awfully, and took her to hear a lot of good music, of which he was very fond.

Jane’s lip curled as she remembered that letter. She had had another last week. It was this second letter that had determined her to go to New York.

“I wish I could see you,” Agnes had written. “Jimmy may go West for a few months. He’s had a temporary position offered him on the Chicago Daily News. I hope he takes it, I’d like him to see Chicago. Of course I have to stick at Macy’s.”

Jane read between the lines just what Agnes really wanted. She wanted Jane to meet Jimmy and like Jimmy and make things pleasant for him in Chicago, so that he would hold down this new job and make life a little easier for them all, financially speaking, when he returned to the Greenwich Village flat. Jane didn’t relish the task. She knew perfectly well what she would think of Jimmy and what Stephen would think of Jimmy and what her mother and Isabel and even her father would think of Jimmy, when he showed up in the West. But Agnes was Agnes. And Agnes’s husband was Agnes’s husband. Jane would do what she could for him. But she would like to go to New York and look over the field.

“Stephen!” called Silly suddenly. “Don’t you think Jane ought to go to New York?”

“Sure I do,” said Stephen amicably. “I’m going to make her go. Of course, I’ve never seen the fatal charm in Agnes⁠—”

“But you’re a perfect husband!” cried Jane, sitting up in the sunshine. “It’s time we set sail for home. Come on, girls!”

Cicily and Jenny turned at her call. Jenny threw the baseball, with unerring aim, straight into the group around the picnic basket. It landed with a plop, right in the centre of her father’s waistcoat. Cicily and Jenny and little Steve all burst into laughter as he collapsed in mock agony under the force of the blow. Jenny came running up in hilarious apology. An Alice in Wonderland child, with straight fair hair strained back from a round comb on her forehead, and a plain practical little face that was her Aunt Silly’s all over again. She had none of Cicily’s blonde beauty.

“Come help us pack up,” said Jane. “We must leave a clean beach.” She was picking up eggshells as she spoke. Silly’s support had strengthened her determination. She would go to New York. Suddenly she realized that she was humming aloud. The refrain of an old Bryn Mawr song, “Once there dwelt captiously a stern papa!” Good gracious! She hadn’t thought of it for nearly twenty years! It would be fun to see Agnes again.