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R. NELSON SMOCK, arriving at his cottage in Maine on Friday afternoon for his weekly recuperation from Wall Street, paused in the hall and looked into the living room before going on in search of his wife. His four children, three daughters and a son, were in the room; but none of them paid any attention to him or even seemed aware of his presence.

This was because of their absorbing interest in a girl of eighteen who sat upon a sofa facing the doorway, chattering to them. She was a stranger to him, and his absent-minded definition for her was, "just another of these summer flappers." He meant nothing intolerant; his own daughters probably were listed under that head in the minds of casual observers, he supposed; and he felt no disapproval of the young lady on the sofa, though he did wish that his children might so far break the thraldom in which she held them as to give him at least a greeting.

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 Only one of them, however, so much as turned a wandering eye in his direction. This was his son, Nelson, a serious sophomore. Young Nelson glanced toward the doorway, and undoubtedly his eye perceived that his father stood there; but with this the youth's perception appeared to stop; there was no evidence that the optic nerve conveyed any information to the brain, and the eye returned with a visible ardour to the young lady upon the sofa. The father was a little disappointed; he felt that he worked hard to keep his children bountifully supplied with all they asked for, and it seemed to him that they might well show enough appreciation to welcome him after his five days of absence. He realized, of course, that it was customary for them to see him return on Friday afternoon; that they were used to both his absence and his presence, as well as to himself and everything he could do for them; whereas, on the other hand, the young lady upon the sofa was a newcomer in their society and evidently appeared to them as a sparkling novelty. Wondering why they thought her important, he looked again at her, but discovered no more than he had before: she seemed indistinguishable from a hundred others.

What he saw was a comely, childlike little face,

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 pink and thin and piquant, with light-brown hair cut short upon the back of the head, but elsewhere left three or four inches long and waved. As for the rest of her, there was a childlike body in a close, revealing, pale-green silk tunic that left her arms bare from the shoulder and her legs apparently bare from just above the knees down to her sleek white slippers, which had three-inch heels. This latter nudity was only an illusion, however; for thin silk stockings, as near the colour of her skin as possible, almost impalpably protected her; but she was inconsistent enough to seem desirous of more protection. From time to time she mechanically pulled at the small skirt of her tunic to bring it down over the exposed knees—a manifest absurdity, since the skirt, when sat upon, had no such elastic possibilities. Plainly, this was only a gesture and an inherited one, an ancestral memory or instinct alive in the race long after the use for it has gone.

She had other gestures, too—a great many of them; some with arms and hands, some with her shoulders and back, some even with her feet; and all of her constant motion was immature and impulsive, or at least so it seemed to a middle-aged observation from the doorway. Yet she was not lacking in an April-like young grace nor in a youthful shapeliness; but that

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 was all the owner of the cottage could see—except the cigarette airily waved in her thin young hand as she chattered. He was not favourably impressed by the cigarette; but his daughters were smoking, too; and he knew he had nothing useful to say, or even to think, about that. As for the young creature's chatter, he could make nothing of it at all; so he gave up this momentary problem and went on in search of his wife. When he found her, not five minutes later, in a garden behind the house, the picture of the girl on the sofa was already merged in his mind with dozens of other new memories, all insignificant, and he did not even ask who she was.

So lightly did the man over fifty almost instantly set aside as trivial what had become the most important thing in the life of his only and treasured son. Young Nelson sat upon a stool and looked humbly up to a beglamoured and honoured sofa that was to him the seat of all beauty, grace, and wit made incarnate and gloriously visible. For three roseate days he had known the incomparable damsel, Claire Ambler, and although both of them had at first been formal, not calling each other by their first names until their acquaintance was well along toward half an hour old, Nelson was sure, by the morning of the third day,

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 that he had fallen in love at sight. Now that it was afternoon and he had been for hours aware of his passion, he saw only wonders before him, with no imperfection anywhere.

In this he bore some resemblance to the girl upon the sofa; for she saw no imperfection in herself. Yet no one thought her egotistical; she often spoke of her faults, though without naming them. On the other hand, she saw no definite perfections in herself; in fact, she had no appraisement of herself either the one way or the other, and it may truly be said that she did not think about herself. Probably it would be as true to say that neither did she think about other people, nor about anything. She had feelings that she believed to be thoughts; she had likes and dislikes that she believed to be thoughts; she had impulses she believed to be thoughts; her mind was full of shifting and flying pictures that she believed to be thoughts; it was also full of echoes of what she had heard and read, and these she usually believed to be thoughts original with her. Words were fluent upon her lips without her knowing or wondering how they got there; yet she was sure they expressed truths and she easily became angry, or grieved, if they were challenged.

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 She knew what she did, but not why she did it; though she was ready with reasons, and could even less well bear a challenge to her conduct than one to her words. Thus, at seventeen, when she had her long and beautiful tresses shorn away, she was irritated with her mother for lamenting. Her hair was cut off, Claire said, because ridding herself of such a burden was "sensible"; and she believed this, not knowing that she bore the civilized disfigurement merely because it was borne by other maidens of the tribe, as mechanical and unwitting as herself. Again, she had been irritated with her father when he questioned the scantiness of her skirt; for this brevity, too, was "sensible," she said, being once more unaware that she had no motive except to follow the fashion of her kind, and did but manifest a mob contagion.

It seemed to her a long, long time since she had been a child, so long that she now had little interest in children—not much more than she had in old people—and both children and old people, like workingmen in flivvers, she felt, belonged to the duller and rather annoying classes. The only interesting persons in the world were of about her own age; in fact they were the only people who seemed to her actually alive; and yet even they were not wholly

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 alive in the full sense that she herself was. That is to say, the universe consisted of herself and of impressions made upon her. All other people, varying dimnesses and brightnesses, belonged among the impressions. There were tombstones in the cemeteries just as there were names and dates in books of history; but there could have been no actual life, such as she knew in herself, until she came upon the earth. All had been darkness until her perceptions began to inform her that she was alive, and even her own childhood now seemed shadowy. Full, broad light had not shone until a comparatively recent time, when she was about sixteen. And at that, all parts of the earth, except the spot where she was, had still but a vague illumination. She did not really believe that the sun was radiant over China while she slept.

To honest young Nelson, worshipping her, she seemed a living being, indeed; but to her Nelson was a pleasantly coloured shape that made more or less agreeable noises. His present expression, however, was entirely agreeable to her, and she was in a degree aware of its yearning significance. She was not wholly aware of what it meant, however, because she did not realize what his feeling meant to Nelson himself; she had no concern with that, nor, indeed, had she

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 any perception of it. She was aware only that it proved how effective her attraction was; it would be useful to her at dances and elsewhere, and she hoped to produce similar expressions upon the faces of other boys. Already she had experience in the art of making them wear this look, and although it was a look not always becoming to them and sometimes made them obviously uncomfortable, it seemed to be, on the whole, the principal thing for which Nature had intended them.

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ELSON'S father had failed to comprehend the interest of the group of young people in what he thought of as the girlish chatter from the sofa. It seemed to him that just as she looked like any other "summer flapper," so also did she chatter like any other little creature of her kind; and in this he had no perception of how "original" and special an individual his children and their friends were finding her. This was to be her first season here; but she had spent summers at other resorts, and was giving them a lively account of the important people of these places. She had intimately known several celebrities of the first water—one of them, indeed, was a captain at Nelson's university—and so, to these listeners, she spoke of grandees of their own world. If Mr. Smock and some of his contemporaries had occupied the living room and young Nelson had come in to find them listening to an elderly stranger gossiping briskly of important financiers, the boy would have thought the session as dismal as it was inexplicable, and per-

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 ments, or to the Hypostatical Principles of the Chymists.

And having here (as in a proper place) to avoid ambiguity, premised once for all, this * Summary Declaration of the sense, agreeably whereunto I would have these Terms understood in the following Notes about the Origine of Particular Qualities; I proceed now to set down some few examples of the Mechanical Production of Cold & Heat, beginning with those that relate to the former, because by reason of their Paucity they will be quickly dispatcht. And I hope I shall not need to make an Apology for mentioning no greater number; since I scarce remember to have met with any Instances of this kind in any of the Classick Writers of Natural Philosophy.

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 haps might have wondered how old men all contrived to look so much alike. He had never in his life seen a girl in the least like Claire Ambler, he was sure; never had he heard a voice so golden; never had he met a woman with so large an experience of the world; never had he been dazzled by so much brilliancy of mind.

He tried to express his bedazzlement as he walked home with her to her cottage in the late afternoon sunshine. "You cert'n'y gave us all a good time," he said seriously. "I couldn't begin to tell you the kick I got out of it myself."

"How?" she asked.

"Well, I don't know; but anyhow I did. It's kind of like something new coming into our lives here, or something like that. I mean the way you talk; or what I mean, I mean the way you say things. You got a way of saying things that's kind of got a kick in it. Anyhow, for me it has, I mean."

She looked at him gravely, seeming much interested; but for a time made no response; and, at intervals bumping into each other slightly, they walked slowly on over the uneven country road.

"I mean it," he said. "Honest, I really do mean it. I mean there's lots of kick in what you say."

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 She pulled a leaf from a hedge, put the stem between her lips, frowned as in perplexity; then asked: "How do you mean?"

"Well," he said, "I mean there is. I don't mean it's only in the way you say what you say; there's more to it than that. F'r instance, when you say something, you say it in a way that's got a kick in it; but I mean what you got to say's got a kick in it too. You see what I mean?"

"I don't know," she said thoughtfully, and gave him a meek glance. "Do you mean you don't like the way I say things, Nelson?"

"No, no, no!" he protested, troubled to have given her this harsh impression. "I mean just the opposite. I mean I like it so much I get a big kick out of it. Honestly."

"Honestly?" she repeated; and the word seemed important to her. "Honestly, Nelson?"

He was distressed and also a little aggrieved by what might have implied a doubt of him. "I don't know what cause I've ever given you," he said, "not to believe in my sincerity."

"But I didn't mean that, Nelson. I was only trying to get at just what you meant."

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 to think you doubted my sincerity, because I think if you aren't sincere you just about as well mightn't be anything at all. Don't you believe in sincerity, Claire?"

"Indeed, I do. If one isn't genuine, then what is one?"

"There!" he exclaimed. "That's what I mean. I mean when you say things like that. I mean that's when I get a kick out of the way you say 'em and out of what you're saying too. Don't you understand what I mean, Claire?"

Strangely enough, she still seemed to be a little uncertain. "I didn't talk too much at your cottage, did I? Of course, as it was the first time I've been there, and just meeting your sisters, perhaps you think I"

"No, no!" Nelson interrupted earnestly. "They were nuts over you, absolutely nuts! I knew they would be. You're altogether differ'nt from the rest o' these girls around here, Claire, and that's why."

"That's why what, Nelson?"

"It's why they're so nuts over you," he explained. "What I mean, I mean, well, you've had so much more experience of life than they have. You've been around lots more places, and about all they ever been

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 is just this one old place—and home, of course, and school, and maybe a trip abroad or somewheres. But what I mean about you, Claire, it wouldn't do 'em any good, prob'ly, if they had been around like you have. What I mean, they wouldn't know how to take in things the way you have. The trouble with them is they wouldn't know how to. You see what I mean, don't you, Claire?"

"I'm not exactly sure," she said. "But I suppose prob'ly that is the trouble with a certain amount of people. Do you know what I believe is the trouble with most people?"

"What is?" he asked solicitously, almost breathlessly; for her tone was deeply serious, and he felt that matters of grave import were before them. "I've often thought about it; but I never did get it worked out in my mind to suit me just right. You can see that most people have got something the matter with 'em; but you can't tell exactly what it is. What do you believe it is, Claire?"

"Well, I've thought about it a great deal, too," she said. "I used to feel it was a question there'd never be any answer to; and sometimes it would make me—oh, I used to get absolutely morbid about it!"

"Did you?" he said gently, touched by the depth

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 of her conscientiousness. "I never got that way about it myself, prob'ly because I haven't got a deep enough nature. You don't any more, do you Claire?"

"No," she said. "Not about that, anyhow, because I'm older now and I think I've worked out the answer."

"Have you? How?"

"Well, princip'ly by observation."

"I think that's wonderful," he said. "What was the answer, Claire?"

"Well, it's this," she said, and they walked more slowly. "I believe the trouble with most people is, they never think."

"You mean"

"Yes," she said. "I just don't understand their not doing it; but if you turn over the people you know in your mind, how many of them can you find that ever really think?"

Nelson became emphatic, as in a great enlightenment. "By golly, I believe you're right! I believe you've got it worked out—that is the trouble with most people. They don't think."

"It's so strange," Claire murmured, a little sadly. "You'd think they would think"

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 "But they don't," Nelson said. "That's the trouble with 'em; they don't think."

At this she appealed to him, as to a superior wisdom. "Why is it, Nelson? I've wondered so much about that. You're a man, and you ought to be able to tell me. Why is it they don't think?"

"Well, I suppose it's prob'ly because they won't take the trouble to. Either that, or maybe because they simply don't know how."

"I believe you're right," she returned, and she gave him a quick little glance of deferential appreciation. "I think that's rather a wonderful idea, Nelson. Only a person that does think could work out an explanation like that."

Nelson's colour heightened, he was so pleased to believe her kind opinion of him warranted. It seemed to him that this was a beautiful walk he was taking in delicious air and sunshine with a companion who understood with him the deeper things of life, the things that he really cared for. "The way I look at it is simply this," he said. "The trouble with most people is they don't even realize there is such a thing as thinking. So—well, when you get with a person that does think, well, you get a kick out of it."

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 "Yes," she agreed thoughtfully. "I think that's true."

"Of course it's true," he said; and he went on: "That's what I meant about the way you were talking, up at the cottage. I knew you were a girl that does think, and you don't often meet with one that does, because what do the ordinary run of 'em care for? What do they talk about? Why, nothing but what they do talk about—just all this and that, till you get absolutely sick of listening to 'em. All in the world they got to go on is simply their sex appeal, and in the long run what does that amount to? All you got to do is analyze it to see it doesn't amount to anything more than just a part of their maternity instinct, and you get awful tired of it. What I mean, you take two people that got more than mere sex appeal, and suppose they meet in a place like this, the way I've met you here, Claire, well, I mean there ought to be a pretty good kick in it." He paused, and then, with increased earnestness, he added, "I don't care for anything that hasn't got a kick in it. Do you feel that way, too, Claire?"

She inclined her head gravely, assenting. "Yes; I think life isn't worth living, practic'ly, unless you get a kick out of it."

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 "I knew you'd feel that way," Nelson said in a low voice. "I knew you would." Then, emotional after the confirmation of this affinity between them, he walked on in silence, believing that she shared his feeling.

But here he pathetically failed in comprehension of his new friend. Claire was wondering which of two dresses she would wear that evening to a dance at the Beach Club; all the way from Nelson's cottage, she had been trying to decide between them; she was only secondarily aware of Nelson, though she had seemed to be giving him a stirred attention. Her share of the conversation had been not much more than the repetition of a familiar formula, yet he found it anything but mechanical. For in this she was exercising an art possessed and habitually practised by most of her sex. Nelson's own mother used a variation of it frequently, at breakfast, when she gave a perfect response to her husband's discourse without listening to it or disturbing in the least the housewifely planning that then always occupied her mind.

Without speaking again, the two young people reached the driveway gate of the house Claire's father had leased for the summer; and here they paused. "Well" Nelson said, a little huskily, for his emo-

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 tion had not subsided but increased. "I suppose we couldn't go on a little way farther? Prob'ly you want to go in?"

"Want to?" she echoed, and, as she wished to look over the two dresses before making a choice between them, she decided against any prolongation of their walk. "I don't know why you should put it that way, Nelson," she said. "One doesn't always do what one wants to."

"But it isn't near dinnertime yet. If you do want to, I don't see why"

"Men never see why," she said gently. "Because they can do what they like with their own time, they always think a girl can."

He sighed. Her tone implied important duties that could not honourably be evaded, no matter what her desires might be; and he understood that her strong inclination was to extend their walk. "Well," he said, "I wish you could; but if you can't" He leaned against one of the pillars of rough stone that served as gate-posts. "Anyhow, I'm glad we've had this talk. There's not many girls I'd care to talk to the way I do to you, Claire, because they wouldn't understand. In the first place, what I mean, I wouldn't talk to 'em the way I been talking to you, and in the

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 second place, if I did, they wouldn't understand what I mean."

"Oh, yes, they would," she said generously. "Plenty of them would, Nelson. You mustn't be so cynical."

"I'm not exactly cynical," he returned, much pleased. "But it's true. I don't know another girl here that I'd talk to like this or that'd understand what I mean if I did."

"Oh, Nelson! Not one?"

"Not a single one."

"Well, I do," she said. "Anyhow, if there aren't any around here I've known girls other places that would."

He conceded a little. "Well, maybe there are girls other places that would; but anyhow you're the only one here. That's the reason I wanted to say something about—about" He hesitated; then went on: "Well, what I mean: You take two people that are the only two people that understand each other in a place like this, and that really care about the same things that the others don't care about, well, what I mean, I think two people like that, if they were at a dance like to-night f'r instance—and knew they cared about the same things the way we do—well, we

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 could walk down to the rocks and sit there most of the time, if you'd like to. I hope you'd like to as much as I would, Claire. Would you?"

His tone was wistful, yet not without confidence in a favourable reply, for Nelson felt that a definite and exquisite tie had been established between them. He was surprised and troubled, therefore, when she did not immediately reply to his question; and after a few moments he repeated it, a little huskily. "You would, wouldn't you, Claire?"

Still she hesitated. That evening was to mark her first appearance before a general collection of the younger summer inhabitants of the place, and her ambition was by no means limited to the capture of an individual. She wished Nelson to be an ardent suitor for her favour, and by his ardour an incitement to competition—in fact, a herald or advertiser for her; and she hoped to be kept too busy, even this first evening, to leave the dancing floor at all. But as the most useful diplomatic reply to his question was difficult, she fell back upon a repetition of something she had just used.

"Girls can't always do what they want to, Nelson."

"What?" He was puzzled. "Why, you could go

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 down to the rocks with me if you wanted to, couldn't you?"

"Not to-night, I'm afraid."

"But you could!"

She shook her head sadly. "No—not if I'd promised my mother."

"But why should she"

"She's old-fashioned, Nelson."

"Oh, dear me!" he said, much depressed. "But anyhow"

"Anyhow we'll see a lot of each other," she interrupted cheeringly, and she gave him a swift, bright look that lifted him to a state of adequate consolation. "Gracious!" she cried. "If you knew all I have to do!" And with that, she said, "G'by!" and flitted lightly up the driveway, while he stood gazing after her in precisely the fond condition she wished. She would see him again, she knew, in about four hours; and she now economically put him out of her conscious thought just as a cook who has set a dish in the oven to bake for some similar length of time, puts it out of her mind and turns to other matters. She went briskly to the selection of her dress, while young Nelson, having watched her out of sight, reverently picked a leaf from the ivy that climbed one of the

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 gateway pillars, and then walked slowly homeward, sighing dreamily. He had lived a long time, he felt, much of it occupied with dreary illusions; and at last he was not only in love, but had found a nature that corresponded to his own. The great harmony had been established between them: she cared for the same things that he did.

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E WAS all the more in a sighing condition because of Claire's devotion to the tasks that called her indoors. He understood them to be useful and altruistic—perhaps aiding her mother with household management, possibly performing secretarial duties for her father; at any rate, something better than the occupations of his sisters, who never did anything, he was convinced, except for themselves. Everything about this girl was beautifully admirable; hers was a deeper nature than that of other girls; and she was so conscientious that she wouldn't even break a promise unreasonably extorted by the old-fashioned prejudices of her mother. Nelson recognized a noble loyalty; but he was a little gloomy about it, too. He had a foreboding of rivalry; there were three or four dashing contemporaries of his whom Claire had not met; and it was partly with them in mind that he had suggested the departure to the rocks. In particular, he felt an uneasiness about the effect upon her of two of his close friends.

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 Platter Thomas and Bill Reek were "all right among men," Nelson thought; but he did not like their manners with girls. Platter and Bill were too informal; they were boisterous, coarse-grained, off-hand; and they were incapable of making fine distinctions; they would not understand that Claire Ambler wasn't the kind of person one slaps on the back. He had seen Platter and Bill presented to a girl on the beach and immediately take her into the surf and hold her under water as a means of establishing, without intermediate tediums, a proper camaraderie. The fact that girls seemed to be flattered by the attentions of the boorish pair, Nelson attributed to a swift and commodious motorboat, their joint property. The motorboat would not dazzle a girl who had seen so much of the world as Claire had, he thought; and yet her very conscientiousness might prevent her from declining invitations. Moreover, Platter and Bill would be certain to tell her about the boat as soon as they met her;—they never failed to drag in an apparently casual mention of it, and he had a premonition that he was going to find them annoying.

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 the evening was half over, and he showed feeling: "I s'pose they been bragging to you about that old tub o' theirs," he said severely, as he danced with her. "They never meet anybody new they don't begin right away to blah-blah about it. I hope you didn't flatter 'em by seeming to take any interest in it—I mean after this afternoon."

"After this afternoon, Nelson?" she asked vaguely.

"Yes," he said. "You know. I mean our caring for the same things. You know."

"Oh, yes," she returned quickly. "Of course."

"You meant it, didn't you, Claire?"

"Meant what?"

"Well—you know. I mean about our caring for the same things. Didn't you?"

"Yes, Nelson."

"Well, since we found that out, don't you think it makes a difference? What I mean: when two people care for the same things, why, I shouldn't think one of 'em would seem so excited about meeting a lot of new men, and look in their eyes, and seem so eager and pleased when they cut in when we're dancing together and everything like that. What I mean: if I didn't remember this afternoon, the way you been

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 behaving to-night I wouldn't even know we did care for the same things."

"But we do, Nelson."

"Well, then," he said reproachfully, "I think you might act more like it, Claire. The way you been acting to-night I wouldn't know whether you cared for the same things or just never thought about anything in the world except mere sex appeal. You haven't promised you'll go out in their old boat with 'em yet, have you?"

"Promised who?"

"Platter Thomas and Bill Reek."

"Which ones are they, Nelson? I've met so many and I get their names mixed up."

At this he was relieved. "Well, I'm glad you do," he said. "So you haven't."

"Haven't what?"

"Haven't said you'd go out in their boat."

"Let me see." A slight frown, as of perplexity, appeared upon her pretty brow. "There were three boys who asked me to motor with them, and one to go canoeing"

"What!" Nelson interrupted. "You didn't"

"Oh, yes," she said, remembering. "And there were two that talked about motorboating. One

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 wanted me to go to-morrow morning and the other in the afternoon."

"Listen!" Nelson said. "You didn't promise you would, did you?"

Surprised, she looked up at his flushed and troubled face. "Well, they all seem so nice and cordial"

"All?" he gasped. "All! D'you mean you're going to do what all of 'em asked you to? After this afternoon?"

"But you don't want me to snub people, do you, Nelson? Just when they're anxious to be friendly and make me feel at home in a strange place?"

"Listen!" he said. "You mean you told all of 'em you would?"

"But what else could I do, Nelson?"

Nelson looked desperate. "You did, then! After this afternoon! You said we care for the same things and then you go ahead and get yourself all dated up like this!"

"But Nelson"

"It's terrible," he said. "It's a terrible thing."

"But we do care for the same things, Nelson, don't you believe it?"

"Well, then, if we do, what makes you go and date yourself up for all this"

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 But here he was unpleasantly interrupted. A muscular hand descended heartily upon his shoulder; Mr. Platter Thomas was "cutting in," and claimed the lady for his partner in the dance. Nelson was left with a sense of injury and no answer to an incomplete question. The sense of injury seemed to be located at first at a point in his lower throat; later, it spread to his chest, and then progressing rapidly, saturated his whole person. Breathing heavily, he determined to "cut in" himself, and insist upon a direct reply; but in this resolve he was anticipated by competitors. Indeed, he was thrice forestalled; and, when his chance came again, he had no more than said, "Listen! If we do care for the same things" before another brisk slap on the shoulder warned him that his time was over.

He was unfortunate; he had bestowed his affections upon one who almost instantaneously became the outstanding belle of that sector of the New England coast. Claire was seldom able to dance more than the full length of the room without a change of partners, and, from Nelson's point of view, the worst thing about this was her visible enjoyment of an odious popularity. Flushed, laughing, radiant, she turned sparkling eyes to every new applicant, even

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] leaf with an arrow, and when four are playing the two partners share equally the winnings or losses. Arrows, bows, and such similar property as these ragged urchins possess are wagered. A bow is considered worth from 10 to 20 arrows, according to quality.

Either two or four may play. The game consists in shooting an arrow so that it will lie on the ground at a distance of about 100 feet and then shooting two more arrows with the intention of casting them across the first.

The children sometimes amuse themselves by tossing into the air corncobs in which from one to three feathers have been stuck. They do not shoot arrows at them.

There are three games in addition to the athletic game of âldû which were played exclusively by the women.

Two women play this game. Five stones that have been carefully selected from rounded pebbles 3 to 4 cm. in diameter (fig. 94) are used. The first player calls one of these "my stone" and tosses it into the air, keeping her eyes fixed upon it while she snatches up one of the other four stones before the first falls. After all are picked up in this way she begins again and picks up two at a time, then three and one, then all at once. If she proceeds thus far without mistake she wins the game. The next game is more difficult. The named stone is tossed up as before, but those remaining are shoved under an arch formed by the thumb and middle finger with the first finger crossed over the middle one. The stones are pushed under the arch in the same order as in the first game. In the one-plus-three combination the player selects one stone which she calls her opponent's and says she will not pick that one up first.

This stave game is played with eight sticks in two sets of four each, which are colored black on the rounded side in one set and on the flat side in the other, the opposite side being stained red (fig. 95). Two play, each using her own set of sticks, but exchanging them

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 though he might be one of the mere loutish hobbledehoys of sixteen who cluttered the floor instead of being kept at home and sent to bed, as they should have been, Nelson thought.

"Pups!" he muttered, watching two of these pursuing to "cut in," while a third danced rapidly away with her, evading them and evading Nelson too. "Pups!" And he said worse of them: "Mere filthy pups!"

For gradually, as the evening wore away, his disposition became soured. Whenever he was able to dance with her for more than a moment, he tried to obtain an answer to his question. "Claire, after this afternoon" he would begin, and once that was as far as he got with it. Again, later, he said, "But if we do care for the same things, Claire" and as she interrupted him there to say, "But you know we do, Nelson," he found only time to add, "Then why don't you act more like it?" She was not put to the trouble of a reply, as the noisy young Mr. Reek intervened.

True, as Nelson stood against the wall while she danced by with others, she would often give him a lovely, wistful glance. "Don't you know we care for the same things?" this tender quick look seemed

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 to say. But he had begun to doubt her seriously, and at last, stung by a little mistake of hers, he decided to hold himself aloof. This mistake was of no great importance, except to Nelson; she was so careless as not to observe until too late that he was standing beside his former friend, Mr. Thomas, and as she danced by them, she flashed to Platter one of those lovely little glances identically wistful. For an instant Nelson thought himself the recipient; then the fatuous expression of Platter and Claire's slight confusion were together all too enlightening.

Immediately Nelson became more completely than ever a mechanism. That is to say, of course, he was like any other human being under the impulsion of strong feelings, a stoked engine compelled to motion. The metal engine will move as long as the fuel lasts; the engine of human appearance will move as long as the feeling lasts; and the difference is that the metal engine is (except for accident) guided by human intelligence while the human engine is not. Nevertheless, just as rails are provided for the metal engine, so are there tracks that the human engine must follow—tracks thus travelled for thousands of years by the mechanical humans stoked by common emotions. To Nelson it appeared that of his own

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 choice he became haughty and indifferent to Claire; he believed that he selected this manner himself; for he had no means of knowing that this and his subsequent performances, as well, were only the operations of a machine running inevitably along over tracks so worn that they are among the most ancient.

Thus, running smoothly on rails—though in his own belief the way was rough and painful—he danced no more that night with Claire, nor so much as looked at her, nor bade her even the most frigid or careless good-night, nor any good-night at all; but in his own mind said farewell to her definitely and for ever. He would have nothing more to do with a girl who had only pretended to care for the same things that he did; and, to make her fully aware of his indifference to her, on the following morning, he risked his life.

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LMOST any body of water with a depth of a few feet, even an inland creek, will afford the means to those desirous of taking such a risk; but an ocean is unquestionably the handiest thing for the purpose. The North Atlantic, in particular, offers opportunity during the glassiest calm of a summer day as well as when distorted by winter tumults; it is necessary only to reduce to the proper degree the staunchness of the craft in which one goes to sea. Upon this point there have been arguments; many coastwise seafarers holding that no canoe whatever is an appropriate vehicle for these waters; while, on the other hand, there are records of notable ocean voyages made in canoes. But not in such a canoe, all will agree, as that selected by young Nelson for his gesture of indifference to Miss Ambler.

It was a dainty slip of a boat, pretty in pea-green and gold, fourteen feet long, with green-and-white cushions: it belonged to the youngest of Nelson's sisters, and she kept it upon an inlet to be used there

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 as an adjunct to moonlight and a banjo. Upon its bows, in gold letters, twinkled the unromantic name, Peanut, never intended for salty incrustations; but salt already dimmed the gold leaf, that morning, when the Peanut spanked itself through the harbour mouth and fantastically stood out to sea. The breeze was from the east, and Nelson knew that Platter Thomas would take the Caliph—the Reek and Thomas motorboat—straight into the breeze, because thus the consequent splashing would be more impressive to a passenger. This was the canoeist's unhesitating cynical conviction, and therefore, desiring to prove to Claire his utter indifference to herself, he paddled straight into the wind and was two miles off shore before the Caliph came in sight.

Of course he expected to show her more than his indifference; he meant her to see a greater man than either of the owners of the Caliph. And here a little mystery is reached. It is difficult to understand why he felt that going to sea in a fourteen-foot canoe proved his indifference to her in particular; though his thought that the voyage would show her his superiority to Platter and Bill is more comprehensible. If she admired daring, his position, compared to that of people in a forty-foot vessel, was admirably peril-

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 ous; but to explain his feeling that a special indifference to her was thus exhibited, it can only be supposed that she was to understand herself included as a part of his life, and he was certainly proving his indifference to that.

For the morning sea had become lively. That is, it was pleasantly choppy for a forty-foot boat, heavy in mahogany and brass, but rather showily rough for a canoe; and the roughness increased with the freshening breeze. In fact, long before he heard the powerful exhaust of the Caliph behind him, Nelson knew he was committed to the eastward course, which took him always farther off shore; he was committed to it because he didn't dare to turn round. He knew that he couldn't trust the Peanut broadside in the trough, which was growing deeper and deeper, richly green and crested with sparkling white; and, since he had no choice but to go on, though the farther he went the more threatening was the sea, his situation began to present an aspect dishearteningly like the realization of a nightmare. He had intended his gesture to be magnificent, but not suicidal; and now, as more and more it bore the latter appearance, he heard with relief the exhaust of the Caliph growing rapidly louder. The glittering motorboat overhauled

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 him; then slowed down and came to its lowest speed, moving alongside the Peanut and not ten feet away. Platter Thomas and Claire sat side by side in the control cockpit, and she was laughing merrily.

Nelson, paddling with tired arms, gave them only a cold and hasty side glance; but there was more than one reason for him to keep his eyes strictly ahead.

"Nelson!" Claire called. "You haven't any idea how funny you look! All you need is a pussy cat and plenty of honey wrapped up in a five-pound note! Where on earth'd you find that ridiculous little boat? Oh, look!" She grasped her host's arm, and Nelson was well aware of this impulsive friendliness of hers, even though he perceived it with the tail of his eye. "Do see its name?" she cried. "It's called the Peanut." And, thoroughly comprehending that she was the reason for the Peanut's present voyage, she uttered peal on peal of girlish laughter.

Platter Thomas was more serious. "Yes," he said. "A peanut's about all it is too." He addressed Nelson sternly. "Look here; you ought to know a thing like that hasn't got any business outside the harbour. You ought to know that much, anyhow."

Nelson did know that much; he knew it poignantly; but when Claire laughed at him and grasped Platter's

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 arm, his bitterness became more acute than his anxiety. "Run along!" he said. "That old gas-tub'll blow up if you ever get a back fire. Run along!"

"Look here!" Platter said. "You go on back where you belong. That canoe's about a quarter full o' water right now, and if you stopped heading her up long enough to bail, she'd capsize on you. Haven't you got any sense?"

"Run along," Nelson said. "Run along and play you're a sailor!"

Platter was irritated. "Look out or I will!" he retorted; but, disturbed by his more humane impulses, he made a magnanimous offer. "Listen! On account of your not having any more sense than to come out here on that shingle, I'll let you climb into my after cockpit; and then Claire and I'll take you back inside the harbour, where you belong. You can stay there and pretend you're out in the real ocean and have just as good a time as you think you're having now. Hurry up and climb aboard; I can't fool with you all morning."

"Run along!" Nelson said. "When you want to really learn something about boats come around and ask me; I'll give you beginners' lessons free."

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 His tone, like Platter's, was not one of good-natured badinage, though it assumed to be that; there was a goading superiority in it, intended to exasperate. Small boys often take this tone with one another; and older boys, even of eighteen or twenty, are so little older that sometimes they use it, too—most frequently, no doubt, in the presence of a courted, pretty young creature like Claire. Nelson and Platter were really insulting each other, though affecting to engage in casual raillery.

The fact that they did affect at least the air of raillery is an indication that civilization is progressing: two young sprigs, rivals for a maiden's favour in the sixteenth-century, would have made no such pretense; daggers would have been tapped, but in spite of our increasing civilization, young rivals still sometimes go to life-and-death lengths; and Nelson deliberately went to that length now. He profoundly desired the security—indeed, the salvation—of the Caliph's after cockpit; he knew that if he rejected it and the motorboat departed, his position would be critical; yet he did reject it. Flopping wildly upon the rushing seas, into which he kept the Peanut headed by only the most watchful effort, he never-

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 theless successfully concealed his real desperation. "Run along!" he said. "Run along and pretend you're scarin' the jellyfishes to death!"

Platter, stung, looked down upon him darkly. "All right," he said. "Don't blame me if you drown!" With that, he slid forward a strip of brass upon the wheel; the Caliph's exhaust again began to roar and the boat slapped forward into the chop. A moment later it was tossing the foam from its risen bows and beginning to speed; Nelson and the Peanut receded quickly as Claire looked back at them.

"Dear me!" she said, still laughing. "He certainly thought he was razzing us, didn't he? How funny he does look—exactly like a grasshopper on a cucumber rind! Such splashing and lurching! You'd almost think he was going to upset."

"He will if he isn't careful," Platter said crossly. "Well, it'd be his own fault. When you offer to help people at sea and they won't take it, you're supposed to let 'em alone; it's a kind of an unwritten law or something; but anyhow he's prob'ly all right. That's his sister's canoe and he ought to know how much it'll stand. He'll turn around and go back as soon as we're out of sight and he can't show off any more."

"I guess so," she returned; then she pointed to

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first Experiment is afforded me by the Dissolution of Sal Armoniac, which I have somewhat wonder'd, that Chymists having often occasion to purifie that Salt by the help of Water, should not have, long since, and publickly, taken notice of. For if you put into three or four times its weight of Water a pound or but half a pound (or even less) of powder'd Sal Armoniack, and stir it about to hasten the dissolution, there will be produc'd in the mixture a very intense degree of Coldness, such as will not be onely very sensible to his hand that holds the Glass whilst the Dissolution is making, but will very manifestly discover it self by its Operation upon a Thermoscope. Nay, I have more than once by wetting the outside of the Glass, where the dissolution was making, and nimbly stir-

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 three small black triangles lifted at the moment from the surface of the water. "Aren't those sharks?"

"Yes, they are."

"They're going the other way, aren't they, Platter?"

"Yes, toward shore."

She laughed delightedly. "How thrilling! If they keep on they'll pass right by Nelson. You s'pose he'll see them? You s'pose it'll make him nervous?"

"Do him good if they did," Platter said severely, and then added, with little hope for his former friend's chances of improvement: "But they never do hurt anybody and I guess he knows it."

Here his surmise was correct. To the best of Nelson's information the sharks in these waters had never attacked a living person and were not maneaters; nevertheless there is a striking difference between knowing such a thing on shore, or on a staunch vessel, and knowing it in a fourteen-foot canoe undecided between swamping and capsizing. For the three sharks did indeed hold their course toward the coast; Nelson did indeed see them; and they did indeed make him nervous, though without doing him the "good" so securely prophesied for him by young Mr. Thomas.

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 "You get away from here!" Nelson said angrily to the three triangles when they were revealed to his view almost directly ahead of him, and only a few short waves distant.

They continued to approach, placidly sinister.

The Caliph was now so far away that the two figures in the cockpit were indistinguishable. The boat appeared to be no more than a small brown arrowhead, flying upon two little white wings of spume; and Nelson knew that he himself and the Peanut had become invisible to the Caliph. His human loneliness upon the vast water all at once seemed a dreadful thing; and the next moment, when he saw the three dark fins close together and shining wetly in the dip of the wave just beyond the Peanut's bow, uncontrollable panic seized upon him suddenly and completely.

"I told you to get away from here!" he shouted fiercely.

Then, forgetting his urgent need to keep his paddle every instant to its proper service, he swept it forward through the air in a gesture threatening the three ominous triangles. The bow of the Peanut immediately swung round into the trough and the little boat, caught upon its side, received a cargo of

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 water and half capsized, half sank. Nelson went down into the cold salt water, gasping, "Oh, my gosh!"

Mentally, he had an insufferably crowded moment beneath the surface. He felt excruciating annoyance, hatred, and an anguish of revulsion. The annoyance was with his own folly, which he had the pain of realizing fully, under water; the hatred was for Claire; the revulsion was from his own recent dramatic emotions—from all that had led him to offer himself as a drowning breakfast for three sharks.

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HEN he got his head out of the splashing water and one hand upon the side of the canoe, which was not wholly submerged. It gave him a slight support, enough to sustain him when he paddled with his other hand. The three triangles were not to be seen; but he had no need to fear them, nor indeed, to fear anything; for, on such a day, there are more keen eyes along that coast than landsmen at sea suspect. The waters there are like the Sahara, where Arabs and camels appear miraculously from the vacant expanses of sand. Both sea and sand, where the stranger sees nought else, are incredibly peopled.

A beating in Nelson's ears grew louder and more definite; it was the hard voice of a one-cylinder engine in a lobster fisherman's dory—a dory of the colour of the sea, a dory much the colour of its owner. "I see you when you come out the habbuh," he explained, as he helped Nelson to climb aboard. My godfrey mighty!' I says. 'Them summuh

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 people do lean to fancy ideers about whut's a good vessel to navigate in.' Had my eye on you and wan't surprised what happened. Didn't reckanize you, Nelson. I wun't spread it on you if you tell me why you done it."

"Didn't have any sense," Nelson muttered, so abject was his mood. "Guess I found out I never did have any."

In this he meant more than the rescuer perceived; he meant that he had risked his life to impress a worthless girl for whom he now felt the sharpest distaste, asking of destiny no greater boon than that he should never see her again. He thought of her with something like horror; and after they had emptied the Peanut and taken it in tow, he was glad to leave the scene of his idiocy and to be heading for the sane and undramatic shore. He wished to be far from the path of the Caliph on her return to the harbour.

That fast and hardy motorboat, however, speeding back with almost the accuracy of a bee over her outward course, passed within fifty yards of the spot now so loathsome to Nelson, and made a troublous discovery. The dory owner and Nelson had fished two of the Peanut's cushions out of the water, but could not find the third, nor the paddle so care-

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 lessly misused by Nelson. The Caliph, higher in the air, and with a greater field of vision, found both. It was Claire who saw the green-and-white cushion.

"Something ahead to the left," she said. "It's just under water; but a little of it sticks out. Let's see what it is."

Platter throttled the engine down, then threw out his clutch; the Caliph lost headway and lay heaving beside the water-logged green-and-white cushion against which bobbed and snuggled a yellow paddle. Platter's mouth opened dismally.

"My goodness!" he exclaimed. "Say!"

"What's the matter?"

"They're his. They're Nelson's."

"But you don't—you don't think"

Platter swallowed heavily. "I told him he had no business out here in that canoe. I told him he didn't. I told him he hadn't any sense. I told him"

"Platter! Do you mean he's drowned?"

"No," he said. "But—but—well, it begins to look kind of queer."

"Oh!" she gasped. "How awful! How awful!"

"It begins to look pretty queer," Platter repeated. "It certn'ly does."

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 They sat staring incredulously over the side of the boat at the bobbing cushion and paddle; and for a long and disturbing minute neither of them spoke again. Then she put a trembling hand upon his arm. "Ought we—ought we to've made him come with us, Platter?"

"That's what everybody'll say, I guess," he answered huskily. He coughed, and his tone became querulous. "You heard me warn him. You can prove I did. You heard me tell him he had no business to be out here in that"

"Platter!" she cried, interrupting him, in sharpest distress. "You mean you think if anything's happened they'll blame us?"

"I guess they will."

"But why? How could people be so terrible? We didn't have a thing to do with it—not a thing! We told him it was dangerous for him to be out here in that canoe; we begged him to get in our boat."

"Yes. I know; but they'll say"

"It's just horrible!" she said, and she began to cry. "We tried to make him come with us, and if something's happened to him it was absolutely his own fault, and if people—if they could be so mean

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 and cruel—if—if" Agitation overcame her; she failed of coherency and could get no further with her meaning.

"Well," Platter said presently, "we don't know. Somebody might 'a' picked him up." But he gulped as he said it; and he added, "Of course it does begin to look kind of queer."

"And they—they'll blame us?"

For reply, he made an ominous motion with his head, not trusting his voice; and with that, Claire's weeping became an audible sobbing. Platter sat silent, still gazing at the cushion and paddle; but after a time this inaction became intolerable to him. He took a boat hook from its fastenings; and with a little difficulty got the paddle and cushion aboard. Then his passenger asked brokenly, "What you—what you doing that for?"

"We got to," he answered. "We got to take 'em to—to his family."

She protested. "I can't! I just can't! Have we got to?"

"Yes," he said doggedly. "We got to." He stared with sombre eyes at the blue coastline; then drawing a long breath, he pushed forward the clutch lever, and slowly advanced the throttle. The Caliph moved

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 forward with the running seas. "I guess if it's true the whole place'll go sour on us," he said. "They'll treat us like a couple o' murderers all summer." Then he added desperately, "Well, whatever they do, we got to stand it."

"I can't!" she sobbed. "I can't! I can't!"

But she knew that Platter spoke the truth. What awaited them on shore must be borne; and in this realization Claire suffered a sharper pain than any she had yet endured in the whole course of her life. For, though she did not know it and felt that she had lived much and at times suffered much, she had never, hitherto, borne anguish at all. She had endured little achings and some mortification while her teeth were being straightened; she had been through difficulties and discouragements at school; she had wept softly at the funeral of a great-uncle when a quartet sang "Lead, Kindly Light"; but, until to-day, the worst thing that had ever happened to her was a light attack of scarlatina. She had contracted it a week after she "came out," just before the Christmas holidays, and she had wailed piteously to her mother that she was "missing everything!" But though she had no suspicion that her life had been a child's bed of roses, giving her no opportunity to learn anything

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 worth knowing, she was wholly unprepared to be blamed for the drowning of a troubled suitor. For she knew well enough that it was on her account that he had come out into the open sea in the Peanut.

In justice, it must be said that if Nelson had been less arrogant when the Caliph offered him help, she might have spared more thought than she did for the pathos of his struggles in the water and for the probable grief of his family. But pathos does not attach itself to the memory of an overbearing person; and so her shocked imagination was fully occupied with miserable prophetic pictures of her own shattered summer. The season's career, so triumphantly begun last night, was already a ruin; she would be coldly looked upon; she would be pointed out with harsh disapproval; and, what was sheerly unendurable, for the next week or two—her mother's sense of good taste might insist upon longer—she could not even go to any of the dances. It was conceivable that the young people of this new place, at the outset so cordial, might "drop" her; and, shuddering, she faced a pariah's tragedy.

"Platter!" she moaned. "I can't go back! Turn the boat around. I can't go back!"

"Got to," he said. "We got to go through it."

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 At that, overcome by the thought of the bitter injustice awaiting her, Claire again sobbed aloud. Platter, occupied with his own apprehensions of injustice, proved to be unsympathetic.

"Hush up!" he said. "Gosh!"

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HE Caliph sped into the harbour entrance and swished through the still water to the floats before the clubhouse, where two attendants, dressed like sailors, roped it in its accustomed berth. Nelson, still thoroughly damp, had just landed from the much slower dory; and he paused upon the veranda steps looking down icily upon the arrival of the Caliph. For a moment neither Platter nor Claire saw him, and as she stepped out upon the float Nelson perceived that she had been crying. Moreover, in the cockpit there lay his paddle and the Peanut's cushion, and he understood what must have been their significance to those who discovered them.

His severity was shaken; he saw that she still wept, and that her thin young shoulders were hunched and bowed. Grief was there; was it for him?

Then she saw him, and her startled eyes grew round; a brightness came upon her face. She rushed to him, running over the swaying floats as fast as she could. She seized both of his hands and pressed them

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 to her breast. "Nelson! Oh, thank heaven! Thank heaven!"

"What for?" he asked gruffly; but he was touched. Nay, he wavered. Once more they seemed to care for the same things; once more she seemed adorable.

In her agitation she spoke exactly what she felt and much too straight from the heart. "What for?" she cried. "Why, we thought you were drowned and everybody in the whole place would blame us for it! Everybody'd 'a' said I was to blame; I know they would!"

The revelation was complete and so was Nelson's disillusionment. He tried to pull his hands from her; but in the happiness of her great relief she held them but the tighter, and then, in his renewed revulsion he forgot to be a gentleman.

"So that's all you were thinking about! It didn't matter a darn thing about my getting drowned and my father and mother and a few things like that!" He used a terrible word. His great-grandfather, under similar circumstances, might have caused a lady to faint by addressing to her the epithet, "heartless coquette." Nelson's generation has less care of its English. "Leggo my hands," he said. "You Prom-Trotter!"

Staggered, she released him; and then slowly, her

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 cheeks burning and her eyes fiery with the endured insult, she went through the clubhouse and walked up the dusty hill-road toward her cottage. "Prom-Trotter!" She had lost him, lost the impetus his competition would give the others, and that could be borne; but the rage she felt—like the anguish that preceded it—was intolerable. Anyone passing her would have thought the hill too steep for her, though she could easily have taken it at a run. She had grown pale, and her breast heaved with her tumultuous breathing.

"He dared!" she panted. "He dared!"

Again tears were hot upon her eyelids; she clenched her small hands, and bit her tremulous lower lip to keep it still. Self-pity and hatred filled her. "I wish he had drowned! I wish those sharks"

In her mind's eye she saw Nelson struggling in the cold salt sea and the three grim fins approaching hungrily. "Eat him!" she imagined herself saying. "Eat him!" This time, she willingly accepted the responsibility; but she got no comfort out of it. She got no comfort out of anything; she was fiery with anger, yet helpless in a keen misery.

Then a strange thing happened to her. As she imagined Nelson in the water she seemed to see his

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 scornful eyes looking at her with all the bitterness that was in them just now when he insulted her. Suddenly, and not knowing how it happened, she realized that Nelson was a person, a being like herself, full of himself as she was full of herself. He was not just some impressions made upon her senses, not just something for her to use; he was as much a person, in fact, as she was. Moreover, in this revelation she understood that he had suffered; that she had been nearly the cause of his death; and that to die meant as much to him as to die would mean to her.

She stopped short, looking up blankly at the warm noon sky above the brow of the hill. "Oh, my goodness!" she whispered. "He was right!"

She was dazed, stricken with her bewilderment and her unhappiness; what had happened to her appeared to her as nothing short of tragic. On the contrary, she should have been full of a new delight; for the thing that had just befallen her on the hillside was of a prophetic beauty; it was the beginning of her life as a being independent of her mechanical self. Out of her rage and pain and the hot pressure of old, old instincts and urges, intelligence was being born.

For the first time in her life, she had just had a thought.

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180 alternately, so that first one set is in use and then the other. They are held loosely in the right hand and are thrown from the end of the metate or any other convenient stone. If all fall red side up one point is scored by a mark in the sand. Tf all are black two are counted. Winning four points completes the game.

This is the Gileño form of the widespread dart-and-ring game. It is not exclusively a woman's game, but was sometimes played by them. The younger generation knows nothing about it. The apparatus consists of a series of rings cut, from cultivated gourds (fig. 96). They vary in diameter from 3 to 12 cm., and are strung on a 2-ply maguey fiber cord 50 cm. long. They are kept from slipping off at one end by a rectangular piece of gourd a little larger than the opening in the smallest ring, which is at that end. At the other end of the string is fastened a stick 20 cm. long, the outer end of which is sharpened. The game is to toss the rings up by a swing and, while holding the butt of the stick, thrust the dart through as many of them as possible. If the thrower fails she hands the apparatus to her opponent, but she continues throwing as long as she scores, and counts the number of rings that are caught on the dart. In the specimen collected

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T RAONA, that ancient Mediterranean town on a cliff ledge halfway to the sky, there is one of those romantic hotels that once were monasteries. The pedestrian comes to it by flights of stone steps leading down from sixteenth-century streets; he enters a cloister where there are oleander trees and an old pink-and-white-marble fountain; then he crosses a groined corridor with a pavement of red tiles worn uneven by centuries of monkish treading, and walks out into a sunny garden on the top of a precipice. The garden is murmurous with bees, with the faint swishing of the slow, turquoise sea a thousand feet below, and sometimes, perhaps, with a quiet English voice reading the Odyssey to an invalid drowsing in the tremulous shade of feathered palm trees. Nothing could be more appropriate than such a reading, moreover; for the sea, so far below, is the very water traversed by Odysseus as he sailed nearer to Scylla and Charybdis; and Mr. Eugene Rennie, an American villa-dweller in Raona, coming

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 into the garden upon a bright March morning in search of an enfeebled English friend of his, was pleased to find him thus entertained by an attendant spinster.

"I mustn't interrupt you, Miss Orbison," the visitor said, as he seated himself upon a painted iron bench beside them. "Really, this is just what I persuaded your brother to come here for. It's gratifying to me to find that on your very first morning you've discovered the exactly proper thing to do. Won't you go on with the reading?"

The invalid protested. He was a long, eager-eyed, brown-haired man whose extreme thinness of body was perceptible even under the heavy rug that enveloped him to the waist. "No," he said. "My sister has had enough of reading this morning, and so have I. Ulysses has been dead a very long time and I have been nearly dead a longer, I think; I'd like to hear something of people who are more alive. Last evening after you brought us up from the station and got us installed in our cells, I contrived to hobble into the refectory for dinner and so had a view of our fellow guests in this extraordinary house of entertainment. It seemed to me I never saw a crew of cosmopolites more provocative to my curiosity. Can they actually

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 be as interesting as they look, or is it the background? The fact that we sleep in the cells of dead monks, and have tea in their abbot's corridor, may lend an exotic tint to people who would appear commonplace enough elsewhere; but they do seem coloured by romance here. Who in the world are they all, Eugene?"

"Who are they all?" the American repeated, and shook his head. "I drop in here for tea sometimes; but I usually don't know many of the hotel's guests and so I can't tell you definitely much about them—which may be the better for you, my friend."

"The better for me?" the Englishman repeated, a little perplexed. "How 'better'?"

"Because where you have no restraining information you can indulge your fancy. Yonder, for instance—that fat, black-bearded man by the pergola. Why does he wear thick white gloves in the warm sunshine? Since I can't tell you anything about him, you are at liberty to imagine any past for him you like. Obviously, that black-bearded man is a sleeked-up scoundrel who made himself wickedly rich out of Arab slave raids with Tippoo Tib thirty years ago, and it is the simplest thing in the world to see that he keeps his gloves on to conceal a telltale scar."

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 The invalid laughed. "I should say he wears his white gloves to show the rest of us how fashionable he is. But how about that sort of thing?" A movement of his head directed Rennie's attention toward two dapper young men who had just come into the garden and stood upon an upper terrace, where they paused to look about them. "I think I've seen something unpleasantly like those on the Parisian boulevards at night; and one could imagine a slave-raiding future as well as past for them."

The slight frown on his forehead was repeated upon the brow of his American friend. "I'm afraid one could," Rennie said, and his glance at the two young men showed an increasing disfavour. "That pair I do happen to know." Then, as if to confirm this information, the two dapper young men simultaneously caught sight of him, and, removing their brightly ribboned hats of soft white cloth, saluted him with a quick yet solemn inclination of the body from the waist.

They were thin and rather small, of pallidly swarthy complexions and shining black hair that was like jet shaped into waves. Each had a long and pointed nose, thin cheeks and noticeably glistening eyes, to which each had unnecessarily added the

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 glitter of a monocle upon a black cord. The English invalid, still frowning, mentioned this adornment. "Monocles! Why in the world do they do it?"

The American laughed. "That's the fault of you Britishers. You carried the monocle over the Continent and even to outflung relics of history like Raona, and the impressionable Latin peoples, at first petrified by it, afterward perceived its advantages as a symbol of distinction. Not everyone can wear a ribbon in his buttonhole; but there are no restrictions upon the single eyeglass. The two Bastoni brothers yonder took them up last year when they began to attend the tea dances at the Salone. That's a species of casino we have here, though we wish we hadn't."

"Is that all they do—dance at the Salone?"

"Almost," Rennie answered. "They come from Cabrania near here, and all I've ever heard of their doing, except dancing and mixing rather nefariously in local politics, is selling their grandmother's jewellery. Now and then, as a great favour and with great secrecy, they sell a brooch or a ring—'family heirlooms'—to ladies they've danced with. They buy the jewellery in Naples, I believe; but they dance exquisitely."

"No doubt," the Englishman said. "They look as

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 though they cut throats exquisitely too. You speak of them as Latins; but they appear to me as something rather Saracen."

"Yes, probably," Rennie agreed. "It's a mixed blood hereabouts; most of the people have a Saracen mingling by inheritance."

"It seems so," the invalid said; and he grunted. "Wolfish look it gives 'em." He turned his head toward the sea. "I think there are other people here I'd prefer to meditate upon. There, for instance."

He nodded toward the railing that enclosed the garden, and protected absent-minded strollers from walking over the rim of the precipice. It was a scroll of wrought-iron, black against the distant hazily twinkling stretches of sea visible from where they sat; and an American girl, slowly crossing the garden, paused and put her small gloved hands upon the railing, leaning over it to look thoughtfully down upon the surf far below her. Standing so, she was a graceful figure, and the Englishman found her charming.

"How prettily she's put herself in the precise centre of the canvas!" he said, for by chance she stood at the end of a short leafy vista, and was thus, to their view, neatly framed in shrubberies and a low arch of vines trained overhead. "She's like a lovely silhouette

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 imagined by the artist in wrought-iron who made the railing. The scrollwork seems to spring from her, carrying on her own delicacies of outline; and with that little green knee-long skirt fluttering against a faded blue sea the colour of a Leonardo background, she's the most appropriate thing I could imagine for a Mediterranean garden on a precipice. Yet how completely she's an American, Eugene! One never mistakes your compatriots for anything else. She has the American profile that the most charming of your young ladies all contrive to obtain—especially the straight little nose that has the piquant effect of turning upward without actually doing it. I suppose, alas, she talks through it?"

"My dear Charles Orbison!" Rennie exclaimed. "How careful you British are never to miss a chance of proving the stubbornness of your race! Early in the nineteenth century you got the legend established among you that we're all Yankees and all talk through our noses; so you'll believe it forever, no matter what your ears tell you. As a matter of fact, the young lady yonder has studied music in Paris; she sings really well, and when she talks doesn't talk through her nose. Neither has she been at the pains to learn how to chirp like a vociferous little bird in

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 imitation of ladies in your own island. I'm sure Miss Orbison will forgive me."

"Quite," Miss Orbison returned serenely. "It's the most perfect description of my own manner of speech. But since you decline to admit that the pretty young creature yonder talks through her nose, I think you must have been listening to her."

"Yes, a little. She's a Miss Ambler."

Amber' instead of 'Ambler' might have been better," Orbison said. "To give the colour of the lights in her hair, I mean. I observe that she's not only an American but an heiress as well."

Rennie laughed. "Of course all American girls abroad are heiresses! Why do you think Miss Ambler particularly one?"

"The monocled Saracens," Orbison explained, with a gesture toward the two Bastoni, who were descending from the upper terrace. "At sight of her they became instantly a trifle more wolfishly glittering. They are coming down upon her—but I must say she doesn't seem averse."

Miss Ambler, in fact, appeared to be delighted. Turning from the sea, she waved her hand toward the two young men, smiled with eager cordiality and

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 called to them some welcoming words in Italian. That was as far as she got in their own tongue, however; for she fell back upon French as they came nearer her, and in that and some fragments of English, the greeting was completed. Each of the brothers formally kissed the back of her extended hand; then the little group turned to the railing, and the girl began to chatter in phrases from the three languages just employed, though the sound, and not the meaning of what she said, was all that came to the trio looking on.

"Shouldn't you offer a maiden from your own shores a rescue, Eugene?" the Englishman inquired. "That's too nice a little girl to be playing Red Riding Hood so gayly."

"She won't be eaten," his friend rejoined. "She's twenty-one, and as for my offering a rescue, American girls don't encourage rescues on the part of middle-aged strangers—though I'm not wholly a stranger, it's true. Her mother brought letters to me and they've been to dine with me once or twice since they came to Raona three weeks ago. Mrs. Ambler is a widow; the daughter yonder is her only child, and both of them are seeing this part of Europe for the

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 first time with an eager inexperience I should call quite perfect."

"That may be," Orbison said. "But surely even the most inexperienced mother would make some excuse to call her daughter away from two such young men as that."

"No; she wouldn't," the American returned. "Mrs. Ambler would never call her daughter away."

"You don't mean the mother might encourage your Saracen friends?"

"No: but she wouldn't be at all alarmed about them and probably thinks them 'delightfully foreign.' Besides, she's an American mother and far too well trained ever to call her daughter away."

"I dare say," Orbison murmured discontentedly. "But after all, a girl of twenty-one is still something of a child, and if she has a mother trained not to interfere—well, I hope your patriotic confidence that an American girl is equal to anything may be warranted, Eugene."

He paused, listening to the cheerful sound of Miss Ambler's chatter. She was eagerly hurrying forth upon the air an overcrowding multitude of words, emphasizing most of them, yet breaking them continually with interjected syllables of laughter, and

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 accompanying them with an almost uninterrupted pantomime of gestures. And this voluble pantomime of hers, as the invalid noted, was not descriptive; her gestures pictured nothing; but were merely motions expressing liveliness, good will, and the desire to be entertaining. "Great heaven!" he said with sudden vehemence. "Wouldn't you give a great deal to know just what's inside that pretty little head of hers? That child's as animated for those two sleeked wolves as if they were young Bayard and young Galahad. Why does she make such a to-do over them? Is it because Americans on foreign shores are helplessly unable to distrust even sinister appearing strangers? Or is it"

But here he interrupted himself with an exclamation. "Hello! I think she is to be rescued; but surely the rescuer isn't her mother. An Italian, isn't she?"

The lady of whom he spoke had just come into the garden from the hotel, and was descending the steps to the lower terrace, evidently with the purpose of joining Miss Ambler, upon whom the gaze of her dark eyes was fixed. She was a pale woman not young: and though she was dressed all in black, the effect she produced was more graceful and friendly than som-

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 bre. Her gaze was serious, but smilingly so; and there was even vivacity in the gesture with which she caught both of Miss Ambler's hands in her own, when she reached her.

The Bastoni brothers seemed to become graver and more glistening; but the pale lady apparently had no consciousness whatever of their presence, and, retaining one of Miss Ambler's hands, she at once moved away with her to another part of the garden, engaging her in a busy conversation seemingly of cheerful import. The two Bastoni, thoroughly chilled, stood motionless, gazing after them; and then, with monocles gleaming icily, they turned and walked solemnly back into the hotel.

Rennie chuckled. "They've had to give up the hope of eating Red Riding Hood for this morning, at least."

"Who was that very charming lady, Eugene?" Orbison asked.

"She's called the Princess Liana—a widow. I'll see that you meet her immediately, Charles."

But the invalid, who had leaned forward in his long chair, sank back smiling, and with a gesture of his thin hand, waved away his friend's badinage. "Too late," he said. "As bad a back as mine exempts

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 one from all but the impersonal fascinations. Why did she rush in where a trained American mother wouldn't, Eugene? Has she an eligible son?"

At that, in appreciation of his friend's perspicacity, Rennie laughed outright. "She has a son, yes—a splendid one. You guessed it like a shot."

"Of course!" Orbison said, and peering through the shrubberies, he could see the Princess Liana and the girl seated upon an iron bench at the other end of the garden. "I believe that pretty little American head is just about the most piquant one I ever saw," he said. "It's not beautiful, perhaps; but it's as flashingly pretty a thing as the world can show. And what's inside it? You needn't laugh at me, you two! What's left for me except to speculate upon such matters? An invalid's place in the world is a seat in the stalls to watch the play and try to comprehend the characters of its people. I have to confess there's one character I see from time to time that always baffles me—it's the young American girl of that kind yonder. To me she's the most mysterious creature the universe has produced. I have a good enough working-idea of Kaffirs; of Arabs, Jews, Bengalese, Afghans, Turkish Beys and Argentine millionaires; I think I know pretty well what goes on in the

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text:
Bad Girl

 * Bad Girl (1928), a novel by Viña Delmar
 * Nattie Nesmith (1870), also known as The Bad Girl, a novel by Sophia Homespun

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 mind of a communist girl agitator from Warsaw, or in that of a cabaret dancer from Budapest; but when I look at these slim and lively maidens of your tribe, Eugene, it's as though I were confronting a species from another planet. What does she feel? What thoughts has she?"

"What does anyone feel? What thoughts of our own do we understand?" Rennie suggested. "One has to go to Vienna to find out anything about that; and then what he gets, principally, is an old definition in new words."

"I don't mean I'd be interested in a psychologist's chart of her," the Englishman said grumblingly. "But I do wish I knew what goes on in that young head!"

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HIS Platonic desire of his proved to be not at all an invalid's mere whim; and, to the pleased amusement of his sister, he omitted no opportunity to gratify it. In the afternoons, when the tea tables were set along the walls of the long, dark monkish corridor, Orbison would come hobbling forth from his cell and direct her to find places as near Miss Ambler's as possible; he had the maître d'hôtel change their table in the great refectory to one next to that of Miss Ambler and her mother; and when he was prevented from sitting near the Americans for after-dinner coffee, cordials, and music in the corridor, Miss Orbison accused him of becoming querulous.

"He swears," she informed Mr. Eugene Rennie one morning in the garden, a week after his interruption of the reading of the Odyssey. "Whenever I miss a chance to get him near Miss Ambler he uses the most fearful language he knows, and he knows a great deal."

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 "I don't," Orbison protested, from his long chair. "I may know it—I mean, I don't use it."

"Dear me!" she cried. "I shouldn't like Mr. Rennie to hear what you said to me last evening when you thought we weren't going to be near enough the young lady for you to listen to her chatter during the after-dinner music. We did finally get near enough, though, Mr. Rennie; and he was so absorbed in listening to her, he didn't even apologize to me. I do wonder what Miss Ambler and her mother think of us, the way we haunt them! Probably they'll expect Charles to propose, in case you introduce him. I really think you'd better do that, Mr. Rennie; I'm sure he's pining to meet her."

"I am not," Orbison said brusquely. "I can listen to her and puzzle about her much better without the pleasure of her acquaintance. She has a pretty voice; but what she says with it—good heavens!"

"You don't find it edifying?" his friend inquired.

"My dear man! I don't find it anything! That's the point—I don't find it! I listened to her for an hour last evening and I give you my word nobody in the world could be astute enough to know what she was talking about! The great mystery is, what in the name of a name could she, herself, think she was

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 talking about? It's impossible; she couldn't tell you, I swear."

"Whom was she talking to?"

"Your two Saracen friends behind their monocles, her mother and a Japanese gentleman they'd picked up somewhere. Of course the mother didn't listen; she embroidered and appeared to be able to detach herself from the daughter's chatter enough to give the music an absent sort of attention. Miss Ambler began to talk with the utmost vivacity before they sat down, and she never stopped. I could only conclude that she was carrying the custom of her own country into foreign parts. Am I correct? In your great democracy is it regarded as the duty of a pretty young lady to be incessantly voluble as the proper entertainment for members of the opposite sex?"

"To a degree, I believe so," Rennie answered gravely. "You found not even the germ of an idea in any of her conversation?"

Germ? the Englishman exclaimed. "It was full of germs! The trouble seemed to be that all the ideas remained in a germinal state; though she had the air of possessing the most vigorous convictions upon them. She asked one of the Bastoni if he'd ever done any big-game hunting, and without waiting for

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 his answer, said she had always been 'perfectly wild to see a rhinoceros charge' because they were such 'thrilling' beasts; but she wouldn't care to eat one; then she asked the other Bastoni if he believed in vegetarianism, and told the Japanese gentleman she adored rice, and asked him if there was a Japanese form of Fascismo and what he thought of the League of Nations. She didn't give him any chance to tell her; but said that the League could never deal with the Soviets and she thought perhaps there was something in the idea that religion is the opium of the people. She abhorred every form of 'Victorianism' she said, including Tennyson, and believed that by the time her own children were grown up, 'birth control' would be 'regulated by law.' Immediately upon that, she said she was reading Dante's Inferno 'in the original'; thought its 'medievalism' was 'perfectly rapturous,' and declared her belief that democracy has proved an utter failure and is producing 'no art worth the name,' though there probably is 'some advance in science.' And 'modern interpretive dancing' is an 'advance,' too, she thought; but the world would be really  ' so much more picturesque without steam and electricity!' Altogether, she made me dizzy. The action of her mind makes me

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 think of a flea upon the open pages of an encyclopedia."

"You spent the whole evening being dizzied by the flea, Charles?"

"No; I didn't have the chance. Your friend, the Principessa Liana, came in and carried her away to some kind of party, as I gathered, at a villa."

"At any rate you've made enough progress toward knowing what's in the 'pretty young head' to discover that Miss Ambler is like a flea."

"You call it progress," Orbison exclaimed, "to be made dizzy! All I've discovered is that listening to an American girl is the last way in the world to find out what are her constituent parts. All I get by listening"

But his sister interrupted, cautioning him to lower his voice. Two young people had just come down from the upper terrace and were walking slowly, in a deep preoccupation with each other, toward one of the iron benches by the railing. They were Miss Ambler and a slender, tall, dark boy of a manly and serious, yet gentle, appearance. That is to say, in the eyes of the two gentlemen, his seniors, observing him, he seemed to be a boy; but he was twenty-four, and his good looks were of that keen outline, almost

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 imperial, still seen at its finest, sometimes, as the ancient heritage of a son of northern Italy.

Miss Orbison glanced at him appreciatively. "What a romantic-looking young prince and what pretty looks they're giving each other!" she whispered. "Surely that's the princess's son you said was splendid, Mr. Rennie?" Then, upon his nodding, she turned to Orbison and laughed. "You have before you the very answer to your puzzle, Charles. Isn't it plain that you're looking at what would occupy all the space in any young girl's head, even an American's?"

"No," he said. "Only the space in her heart." And his tone was so gloomy that his sister looked amazed.

"Dear me!" she murmured. "I thought this was to be a purely Platonic investigation. American girls as piquant as this one seem to be high explosives, only to be studied by experienced experts long accustomed to observing them, like Mr. Rennie. Or perhaps I'm mistaken, and Mr. Rennie is himself painfully disturbed by this advent of a Renaissance princeling. Springtime in Raona may be contagious. Are you as stricken as Charles is, Mr. Rennie?"

She spoke in a lowered voice, almost whispering, for Miss Ambler and her romantic companion were

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 passing close by, just then; and Rennie did not hear the question. He, too, had been amazed by the gloom in the invalid's voice, and sat gazing upon him in delighted surprise. The American knew that in the reluctant opinion of his friend's physicians this was the last springtime Orbison would ever see; but if he could still be depressed by the preoccupation of a pretty girl's heart, it seemed that at least he was so far continuing to be most cheeringly alive.

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R. CHARLES ORBISON might well have been asked if a gentleman wholly mystified by a young lady's mind could be expected to understand her sentimentally; his impulsive diagnosis of what filled the heart of Miss Claire Ambler in Raona was mistaken.

As she sat with Arturo Liana upon the green iron bench looking out upon the classic sea where Greek had fought Greek, and Roman triremes had met Carthaginian galleys, the girl of twenty-one did indeed thrill with romance; but not with a romance particularly concerned with the young gentleman beside her. Neither was the thrill she felt caused by the tremendous history of the spot where she sat, though she knew that in their flesh Plato, the Apostle Paul, Mark Antony, and Cicero had looked upon it; and, in majestic legend, so had Trojan fugitives. Near at hand, upon her right, the groves of the Cyclops climbed the buttresses of the snow-mantled volcano that rose two miles into the air like a god's prodigious tent pitched at the edge of the sea; and,

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Author:Viña Delmar

Novels

 * Bad Girl (1928)

title: Author:Viña Delmar


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 both left and right, from this ledge above the precipice, her eye commanded vast sweeps of surf-edged coast, haunted in every cove and ravine with antique tragedy. Before her, across the straits that led to Scylla and Charybdis, there shimmered in the haze of distance, like a mountain landscape in a dream, the high, blue-cleft shores of old Calabria; and below her—far, far below the garden—the sea was stained to that brilliancy of turquoise colour Claire found unbelievable even when she looked at it.

Overhead, behind the monastery and the town of Raona, there were other incredibilities. Against the sky rose peak and crag and pinnacle of rock, whereon, "like the lead at the point of a pencil," she thought, were ancient little walled towns and the broken towers of stone Saracen and Norman castles. Necromancy must have got them there, it seemed; for human energy, even in medieval passions of fear, would have been too feeble—though, of all the magic about her, what she thought most necromantic in beauty was the Greek theatre that crowned the skyward lift at the end of the long cliff of Raona.

She had been there, the night before, in the moonlight with Arturo Liana; but the thrill of the romantic she felt then, as now, was not caused by Arturo,

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 nor was it primarily the work of the epic beauty surrounding her. Two months earlier, in Rome, she had gone to the Palatine Hill to write a letter beginning, "Seated upon a block of marble in the banquet hall of Cæsar," and necessarily the picture suggested to the mind of her correspondent must have had Claire in the foreground with Cæsar somewhat remote. Thus, as she beheld the august and tragic beauty of Raona, her foremost happy thought was, "Here, surrounded by marvels, am I!"

What romantically thrilled her, then, was her own presence among the marvels; a thrill by no means unpardonable and not unknown to travellers older than Claire; nor need it be held to her discredit that at times she had the pleasantly tingling impression of herself that she was the central marvel of all. She always knew when people were looking at her, although she was pleasantly accustomed to their doing so. Gentlemen in the Louvre had turned from Velasquez portraits to look at her; and here in Raona, when she walked abroad, she was stared at almost violently. When she passed by them, tourists temporarily forgot this most heroically beautiful of all earthly landscapes; and when she came into the hotel refectory for lunch or dinner she well knew that she

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 was politely and covertly watched to her seat by every eye in the place. Demure, thoughtful-looking, and apparently unaware, she made no effort to restrain herself from appearing a little more unconsciously graceful for her observers' benefit—it is true that she did a great many things for her observers' benefit. Indeed, it would not be straining the point to say that most of what she did in the way of gesture and look and talk, when observers were present, was for their benefit. In fact, she sometimes did a little of that for her own benefit when she was alone.

But in particular she had been steadily aware of the observation of a gaunt and crippled Englishman; and he would have been astonished to learn that she had never once failed to know when he was looking at her or listening to her. Even more he would have been amazed by the number of things she had done and said because she knew she had his attention; and probably it would have been the climax of his surprise to learn that her recent conversation with the Bastoni and the Japanese gentleman was intended to reveal to him, in some measure, the variety of the treasures of her mind.

Moreover, as she sat upon the green bench by the

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 garden railing now, with the romantic-looking young Italian beside her, she was really giving a little performance, so to speak, for the Englishman's benefit; though not by the slightest glance in his direction did she seem to take cognizance of him, and she knew that from where he sat he could not hear what she said. But she thought the sound of her voice reached him, and she was careful to keep it musical, just as she kept her posture and gestures graceful, and appeared all the while to be deeply absorbed in the young Liana. Her absorption in him had markedly increased when they came out of the hotel and into the scope of Orbison's view, for Claire had long since discovered her absorbed look was the most becoming expression she knew how to wear.

She wore it now—for its effect upon both gentlemen, of course, but more for its effect upon the one at a distance than for that upon the one at her side; and in this there was an ironical fatality that haunted her. She could never understand it, and often gasped in her hopeless puzzlement over it. No matter what the comparative merits and beauties of any two gentlemen might be, she was forever doomed, so it seemed, to find herself more interested in the one at a distance than in the one at her side.

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