Ted and Oliver were down at the beach at Southampton two Sundays later—week-end guests of Peter Piper—the three had been classmates at Yale and the friendship had not lapsed like so many because Peter happened to be rich and Ted and Oliver poor. And then there was always Elinor, Peter's sister—Ted seemed, to Oliver's amused vision, at least, to be looking at Elinor with the hungry eyes of a man seeing a delicate, longed-for dream made flesh just at present instead of a girl he had known since she first put up her hair. How nice that would be if it happened, thought Oliver, match-makingly—how very nice indeed! Best thing in the world for Ted—and Elinor too—if Ted would only get away from his curiously Puritan idea that a few minor lapses from New England morality in France constituted the unpardonable sin, at least as far as marrying a nice girl was concerned. He stretched back lazily, digging elbows into the warm sand.

The day had really been too hot for anything more vigorous than “just lying around in the sun like those funny kinds of lizards,” as Peter put it, and besides, he and Oliver had an offensive-defensive alliance of The Country's Tiredest Young Business Men and insisted that their only function in life was to be gently and graciously amused. And certainly the spectacle about them was one to provide amusement in the extreme for even the most mildly satiric mind.

It was the beach's most crowded hour and the short strip of sand in front of the most fashionable and uncomfortable place to bathe on Long Island was gay as a patch of exhibition sweet-peas with every shade of vivid or delicate color. It was a triumph of women—the whole glittering, moving bouquet of stripes and patterns and tints that wandered slowly from one striped parasol-mushroom to the next—the men, in their bathing suits or white flannels seemed as unimportant if necessary furniture as slaves in an Eastern court. The women dominated, from the jingle of the bags in the hands of the dowagers and the faint, protesting creak of their corsets as they picked their way as delicately as fat, gorgeous macaws across the sand, to the sound of their daughters' voices, musical as a pigeon-loft, as they chattered catchwords at each other and their partners, or occasionally, very occasionally, dipped in for a three-minute swim. Moreover, and supremely, it was a triumph of ritual, and such ritual as reminded Oliver a little of the curious, unanimous and apparently meaningless movements of a colony of penguins, for the entire assemblage had arrived around, twelve o'clock and by a quarter past one not one of them would be left. That was law as unwritten and unbreakable as that law which governs the migratory habits of wild geese. And within that little more than an hour possibly one-third of them would go as far as wetting their hands in the water—all the rest had come for the single reason of seeing and being seen. It was all extremely American and, on the whole, rather superb, Oliver thought as he and Peter moved over nearer to the parasol that sheltered Elinor and Ted.

“I wish it was Egypt,” said Peter languidly. “Any more peppermints left, El? No—well, Ted never could restrain himself when it came to food. I wish it was Egypt,” he repeated, making Elinor's left foot a pillow for his head.

“Well, it's hot enough,” from Oliver, dozingly. “Ah—oo—it's hot!”

“I know, but just think,” Peter chuckled. “Clothes,” he explained cryptically, “Mrs. Willamette in a Cleopatra nightie—what sport! And besides, I should make a magnificent Egyptian. Magnificent.” He yawned immensely. “In the first place, of course, I should paint myself a brilliant orange—”

The Egyptians. An odd wonder rose in Ted—a wonder as to whether one of those stripped and hook-nosed slaves of the bondage before Moses had ever happened to stand up for a moment to wipe the sweat out of his eyes before he bent again to his task of making bricks without straw and seen a princess of the Egyptians carried along past the quarries.

“Tell us a story, El,” from Oliver in the voice of one who is sleep-walking. “A nice quiet story—the Three Bears or Giant the Jack Killer—oh heaven, I must be asleep—but you know, anything like that—”

“You really want a story?” Elinor's voice was reticently mocking. “A story for good little boys?”

“Oh, yes!” from Peter, his clasped hands stretched toward her in an attitude of absurd supplication. “All in nice little words of one syllable or we won't understand.”

“Well, once there were three little girls named Elsie, Lacie and Tillie and they lived in the bottom of a well.”

[ILLUSTRATION: “WELL, ONCE THERE WERE THREE LITTLE GIRLS”] “What kind of a well?” Oliver had caught the cue at once.

“A treacle well—”

---

She went on with the Dormouse's Tale, but Ted, for once, hardly heard her—his mind was too busy with its odd, Egyptological dream.

The princess who looked like Elinor. Her slaves would come first—a fat bawling eunuch, all one black glisten like new patent-leather, striking with a silver rod to clear dogs and crocodiles and Israelites out of the way. Then the litter—and a flash between curtains blown aside for an instant—and Hook Nose gazing and gazing—all the fine fighting curses of David on the infidel, that he had muttered sourly under breath all day, blowing away from him like sand from the face of a sphinx.

Pomp sounding in brass and cries all around the litter like the boasting color of a trumpet—but in the litter not pomp but fineness passing. Fineness of youth untouched, from the clear contrast of white skin and crow-black hair to the hands that had the little stirrings of moon-moths against the green robe. Fineness of mind that will not admit the unescapable minor dirts of living, however much it may see them, a mind temperate with reticence and gentleness, seeing not life itself but its own delighted dream of it, a heart that had had few shocks as yet, and never the ones that the heart must be mailed or masked to withstand. The thing that passed had been continually sheltered, exquisitely guarded from the stronger airs of life as priests might guard a lotus, and yet it was neither tenderly unhealthy nor sumptuously weak. A lotus—that was it—and Hook Nose stood looking at the lotus—and because it was innocent he filled his eyes with it. And then it passed and its music went out of the mind.

“Ted!”

“What? What? Oh, yeah—sorry, Elinor, I wasn't paying proper attention.”

“You mean you were asleep, you big cheese!” from Peter.

“I wasn't—just thinking,” and seeing that this only brought raucous mirth from both Peter and Oliver, “Oh, shut up, you apes! Were you asking me something, El?”

It was rather a change to come back from Elinor in scarab robes being carried along in a litter to Elinor sitting beside him in a bathing suit. But hardly an unpleasant change.

“I've forgotten how it goes on—the Dormouse—after 'Well in.' Do you remember?”

“Nope. Look it up when we get back. And anyhow—” “What?”

“Game called for to-day. The Lirrups have started looking important—that means it's about ten minutes of, they always leave on the dot. Well—” and Peter rose, scattering sand. “We must obey our social calendar, my prominent young friends—just think how awful it would be if we were the last to go. Race you half-way to the float and back, Ted.”

“You're on,” and the next few minutes were splashingly athletic.

Going back to the bath-house, though, Ted laughed at himself rather whimsically. That extraordinary day-dream of the slave and the Elinor Princess! It helped sometimes, to make pictures of the very impossible—even of things as impossible as that. If Elinor had only been older before the war came along and changed so much.

He saw another little mental photograph, the kind of photograph, he mused, that sleekly shabby Frenchmen slip from under views of the Vendome Column and Napoleon's Tomb when they are trying to sell tourists picture post-cards outside the CafÉ de la Paix. Judged by American standards the work would be called rather frank. It was all interior—the interior of a room in a Montmartre hotel—and there were two people in it to help out the composition—and the face of one seemed somehow to be rather deathly familiar—

That, and Elinor. Why, Hook Nose could “reform” all the rest of his life in accordance with the highest dictionary standards—and still he wouldn't be fit to look at his princess, even from inside a cage.

Also, if you happened to be of a certain analytic temperament you could see what was happening to yourself all the while quite plainly—oh, much too plainly!—and yet that seemed to make very little difference in its going on happening. There was Mrs. Severance, for instance. He had been seeing quite a good deal of Mrs. Severance lately.

“Oh, Ted!” from Peter next door. “Snap it up, old keed, or we'll all of us be late for lunch.”

They had just sat down to lunch and Peter was complaining that the whipped cream on the soup made him feel as if he were eating cotton-batting, when a servant materialized noiselessly beside Oliver's chair.

“Telephone for you, Mr. Crowe. Western Union calling.”

Oliver jumped up with suspicious alacrity. “Oh, love, love, love!” crooned Peter. “Oh, love, love, love!” Oliver flushed. “Don't swipe all my butter, you simple cynic!” He knew what it was, of course.

“This is Oliver Crowe talking. Will you give me the telegram?”

Nancy and Oliver, finding Sunday mails of a dilatory unsatisfactoriness, had made a compact to use the wire on that day instead. And even now Oliver never listened to the mechanical buzz of Central's voice in his ear without a little pulse of the heart. It seemed to bring Nancy nearer than letters could, somehow. Nancy had an imperial contempt for boiling down attractive sentences to the necessary ten or twenty words. This time, though, the telegram was short.

“Mr. Oliver Crowe, care Peter Piper, Southampton,” clicked Central dispassionately. “I hate St. Louis. I would give anything in the world if we could only see each other for twenty-four hours. Love. Signed, Nancy.”

And Oliver, after hanging up the receiver, went back to the dining-room with worry barking and running around his mind like a spoiled puppy, wondering savagely why so many rocking-chair people took a crÊpey pleasure in saying it was good for young people in love to have to wait.