Lewis had anticipated three or four days of sailing among the islands about Mount Desert to the tune of blue sea, blue sky, white clouds, whitecaps, and the salt wind over all. But an unprophesied nor’easter did its best to ruin the holiday. The sky was clear when they started from Boston in Lewis’ car (Dick had been unselfish in letting it be Lewis’ car rather than his own) and it stayed clear until they were within sight of the island. Then suddenly the wind changed and every aspect told them that they were in for a likely three days of drifting fog.

“It will have to be golf and walking, I’m afraid,” Dick apologized for his island. “This is rotten luck. And we’ll have to use all the tact we can muster in dealing with the Langleys. They will be humiliated beyond words!”

The Langleys were the married couple, Yankees and native to Mount Desert, who lived on the Wilder estate in Northeast Harbor and were in charge of the place the year around. The elder Wilders for years past had spent most of their time in Europe, returning for a few weeks each winter to their Brookline home, but coming down to their Mount Desert estate almost never. It had tacitly become Dick’s responsibility and playground. Each summer he entertained several house parties here, and often came alone with some friend, as he was doing now, for a few days of sailing and climbing. If at his appearance the weather was not “typical” the Langleys felt it a flaw in their hospitality; and his days here with Lewis, Dick feared now, would be rife with the good couple’s reiterated apologies for the weather—and all the more insistently because the guest of this particular visit was so important a personage.

“Tell ’em you’d rather walk than sail!” Dick pleaded. “Tell them you know the views so well that it is just as if they were there for you behind the fog! Tell them that fog’s darned restful and just what you need. You see, they are really well-informed people, and you can bet they know all about who you are. You’ll have to work hard, right at the beginning, to put them at their ease, or they’ll be so chagrined they’ll follow us around apologizing all the time. They will be like parents who keep saying when the rector calls that their children never acted up like this before and they simply can’t understand it. You’d think they had created Mount Desert and lived only to display it to me and my guests.”

“I understand.” Lewis laughed. “I’ve noticed that most Mount Desert folk are like that, other years. The first time I came down here, do you know, I couldn’t see any farther than my hand could reach, practically, for two solid weeks. That was in August too. I wouldn’t have known there were any mountains if they hadn’t told me. But you can imagine how they told me! We were just puffing away in the old Morse, when the wind changed and it all came out diamond clear. It was like the never-never land. I thought then that it was the finest scenery in the world. Norway itself can’t beat it. I’ll tell the Langleys that. I’ll tell them how I know it by heart. We’ll see, between us, that they don’t suffer beyond endurance!”

So they drove in at the wide stone entrance gates, laughing.

It was pretty disappointing, all the same. The sky, the sea, the mountains were all there, like the next page in a book—but a page that has annoyingly stuck. Dick took it harder than Lewis, however. He had counted on the sharp clear outlines of this Mount Desert environment to make self-expression easy. He had got Lewis down here, really, for the sole purpose of clearing his own mental and emotional decks of clutter. And the fog, somehow, seemed now an externalization of that inward confusion. Having it here, visibly and sensibly pressing in around him, turned him inarticulate. It was Clare who had planned this expedition, really. She it was who had suggested that Dick “clear his emotional decks by talking things all out with Doctor Pryne.” But it wasn’t going to be so easy.—Besides, Lewis wasn’t acting like himself, Dick thought. You couldn’t call him morose exactly, but neither was he particularly exuding sympathy. He was abstracted: as if he had his own thoughts—even possibly his own worries.

At breakfast the next morning they decided against golf. Lewis wanted exercise, he said, and how about climbing a few mountains? Even without the view, he felt like climbing—strenuously. So Dick, putting aside his own silent preference for a morning of golf, started off as cheerfully as he could manage on a foggy all-day walking and climbing jaunt with this somehow new and strange Lewis. The plan was that they should begin gradually—Asticou Hill, Cedar-Swamp Mountain, and then with second wind acquired, traverse the mile-long ledge to Sargent’s top, swim in the pond below Jordan, and descend the bluffs to Jordan Pond, and a taxi home in time for dinner.

They left Lewis’ car at the foot of Asticou Hill, and started up, thick bars of chocolate in their pockets and thick Alpine sticks in their hands. Lewis was ahead on the faint thread of trail, straining his eyes for the cairns which marked the way. Gray gnomes, these cairns seemed to him, each as it pierced the fog, toppling forward or sidewise, beckoning him back from the pathlessness of foot-high forests of blueberry scrub to the faint footworn windings of the climb.

“I planned a house one summer to stand right here,” Dick said, when they came to a giant gray boulder and automatically halted, leaning their backs against its inviting side, looking down into the sea of fog that shut them onto the hill. “It was my first completely visualized house, really. I was twelve, about. I saw the house as a sort of a growth out of the hill. The skies came down, the sea came up, and the doorsill was solid sunlight. Sometimes I really can’t believe it isn’t here, it was so real to me then. But I went farther than architecture in that first venture. I peopled that house, created a family to live in it. You needn’t believe me, Lewis. I don’t expect you will. But the mother of that family was quite extraordinarily like Clare Farwell. Looked like her, I mean. When I first saw Clare, years after, I recognized her as the woman of my early imagination—the mother in that first house of mine. By the way, we are standing by one of the windows in the bedroom I gave her. The bedrooms were on the ground floor, you see. The whole top story was living room—one huge, spacious apartment, practically all windows. But wasn’t it—eerie—about Clare! Imagining her like that when I was just a kid! I’d never seen anybody like her then. Of course, I couldn’t have. There isn’t anybody like her.... Is there?”

“No, I suppose not,” but Lewis’ response had an absent-minded tonelessness. Yet in another minute he asked, his psychological interests stirring, “What were you yourself in that picture, Dick? Or weren’t you in it?”

“I was the middle son of a large family. I remember you that summer, Lewis. You were down here at Doctor Montague’s with Cynthia. She and Harry got themselves engaged at Jordan Pond. The second time they’d seen each other! I remember my tutor saying to somebody or other that it was a whirlwind affair and he wondered how it would turn out. The word ‘whirlwind’ was what made the grown-up gossip exciting to me and why I remember it now. An exciting word! But speaking of Clare, don’t you think it is rather thrilling the way she has managed to express herself in Green Doors? The firm would be surprised if they knew how little, really, I put myself into it. But that’s good architecting, as I see it. Something like portraiture. If you see what I mean.”

Lewis’ mind was busy with a picture of Dick, a neglected only child, spending long summers on Mount Desert with servants and callow young college-boy tutors while his mother globe-trotted and his father made money,—a child stealing off up here to this lonely, wild hill to plan the ideal house and people it with a mother of his dreaming and a large family of which he was the middle member. “Do you see what I mean? About Green Doors? That it’s portraiture? Portraiture of Clare? And that’s why it’s so perfectly what it should be?”—Would Lewis please come out of his abstraction and pay attention. That’s what Dick’s tone said.

Lewis obeyed and answered. “But is that quite fair? Most houses have more than one person living in ’em. Green Doors has. If you’re going to do portraiture in your architecting, I should think it would have to be composite portraiture.”

“Possibly, with some houses. But not Green Doors. It’s Clare who colors everything there, and a lucky thing for the others! Have you ever known such—such simplicity and utter goodness? Isn’t she wonderful! Aren’t you grateful that I have brought you together? Isn’t just knowing her worth all the trouble you’ve taken with Petra? I bet it is.”

“What do you mean, trouble with Petra? It’s Miss Frazier who had to take trouble with Petra just at first, perhaps. But now she’s invaluable to us both, let me tell you. She has a positive flair for the work.”

“Really! I didn’t realize that. Have you told Clare? She thinks it’s really a kind of charity on your part, keeping Petra occupied. Petra herself says you are patience itself and that she is always doing something wrong.”

“That’s nonsense. Or else a form of perverted modesty. Miss Frazier and I would be lost without her now.”

Dick would repeat this to Petra’s stepmother, Lewis hoped. It was something at last, though almost infinitesimal, of course, that he could do for Petra, who asked and wanted nothing of him really.

Then Dick fell mercifully silent, occupying himself by scrawling letters in the sand at the base of the rock. Lewis began counting the fir-tree tops which pricked the fog with their pointed spires at irregular intervals down the hill; for Lewis had acquired a habit, when Petra was called to mind suddenly, as she had been just now, or came without being called, as she did all too often, God knew, of concentrating on the first other thing that came to hand. Now he counted tree tops. And though he was smoking far too much—he knew—but to whom could it matter!—he took out his cigarette case.

“Clare wanted me to talk to you down here,” Dick said suddenly. “Tell you things. But I rather suspect you know them already. You do, don’t you?”

“What she means to you?” Lewis asked. He was sorry Dick had decided to plunge into intimate confidences exactly at this point. If he would only wait till the fog lifted—till the seascape was diamond clear. If a northwester would only blow! If the weather shifted, Lewis might be able to listen patiently (which was all Dick wanted, of course) to his “If-you-know-what-I-means,” and “Do-you-sees.” But he was in for it now. Dick had Lewis cornered just as, in his utter overworked weariness, he felt the fog had him cornered.

“Yes, what Clare means to me and what I mean to her,” Dick was saying. “I imagine you saw how I felt about her almost before I saw myself. That day when I came to your office! And all during the summer it has gone on getting—well, more and more so. But it isn’t Clare’s fault. She saw things as they were even before I did and she warned me. She wanted me to go away, for my own good. She was sane and beautiful about it. Why, she talked in as detached and clear a way as you could have talked yourself, Lewis. And all the time—which makes her detachment so wonderful—she herself was involved in it all, do you see! I don’t mean that she—that she feels exactly the way I do. She wouldn’t. She isn’t like that, anyway. She’s too—unphysical. But our friendship means everything to her, all the same. She says that passionate friendship is actually more involving than passionate love. Because it absorbs and colors the imagination, you see. If we were lovers, she says—as the world understands the phrase, you know—why, we mightn’t mean nearly so much to each other as we do with things as they are with us. But she was ready to sacrifice this passionate friendship for my sake. She was afraid I might suffer too much, if it continued. You mustn’t think I am crazily conceited, Lewis, when I tell you that not seeing me any more would have meant sacrifice to Clare. I don’t understand myself why she cares for me as she does. The miracle of her caring fills me with the deepest humility. But she does care. Our being together so much means everything to her, as it does to me, only in a different way. And she was ready to give it up! She said that, quite aside from the suffering it might bring me, there was always the chance that my caring so much for her might keep me from falling in love with some girl I could marry, do you see. And she talked it all out with me—quietly, bravely. But I wanted to stay, of course,—just so long as I was sure it was not hurting her, or making her unhappy. Do you understand?”

Lewis sighed. Not only Clare herself, but Clare even heard about, invariably overwhelmed Lewis with the greatest ennui—or in happier moments made him swearing, cursing mad. Just now it was ennui. But he tried to conceal his weariness for Dick’s sake. Dick was not only Cynthia’s husband’s cousin. He was Lewis’ friend of many years. He had no brains—certainly—but artistic functioning in his brainpan somewhere took the place of brains, and most whiles made him companionable enough. So now, after sighing, Lewis said, “Yes, I understand perfectly. But Clare is obviously right: clearsighted, as you yourself must see. The friendship is destructive to you while it leaves her unhurt. You ought to snap out of it. It’s no joke, I know, being head over heels in love with a married woman. But it does happen. And it’s never any good sticking around and trying to get nourishment on half a loaf. A clean break is the only self-respecting possibility. Sorry—but you asked for it, old-timer.”

A silence, charged with emotion (another of Dick’s substitutes for brain) moving toward articulation followed. Then he blurted, “I can’t do it, Lewis. One can’t choose to starve. Half a loaf is better than none—even if it isn’t filling!”

Lewis’ response to that was unequivocal. “It is not better. It’s just a sweet little hell. Clare gave you the right dope. Take it from her, if you won’t from me. If you want to salvage your future, stay a long way away from Green Doors, and snap out of it.”

“You talk as if you knew....” Dick was looking at his friend now with as much curiosity as surprise. “But Clare has stopped saying anything about my going. She put it up to me to decide for myself, anyway. She wasn’t dogmatic and opinionated. Not for a minute! I decided to stay. It’s not that I want your opinion on. I believe, with Clare, in the individual’s right to decide on the happiness or the misery he will take for himself.... So I’m staying,—but, thanks to Clare, with my eyes open. It hasn’t been easy. It is just about what you say—a sweet little hell.”

“Well, of course.... So that’s that. Shall we get going?” Lewis picked up his stick and crushed a half-smoked cigarette under his heel.

“No, wait a minute. See here, Lewis, I want to talk to you. I can’t talk, walking. It was Clare, really, who sent me off down here with you. And I haven’t come to the point of what she wanted me to tell you yet. That was only preliminary. Clare has a scheme.—She thought you’d agree that it was, perhaps, rather a good one.”

Lewis groaned but selected another cigarette. Another “scheme”—“good.” Clare was indomitable. He leaned back again, his elbows on the rock. They might as well have the rest of it now, he supposed, so long as they were messing about in thick fog, anyway. A little more or less confusion from poor Dick’s mindlessness—what did it matter! But the next minute Lewis was galvanized into feeling that it mattered enormously. For Dick had said, “I didn’t go away, you see. And I’m not going to. I couldn’t leave Clare, to save my life. Our friendship (Clare’s and mine) has become of such importance to us both—yes, Clare too—that now we see that nothing in this world could have the power to part us. Least of all, mere physical separation. We must stay—passionate friends. We belong to each other. I don’t think you can imagine, Lewis, what such friendship can be—or what trying to stamp it out of one’s life would do to one. It would be infinitely easier to stamp out a sexual relationship than such a one as Clare’s and mine.... Well, this is her scheme. She thinks it will make it possible for our friendship to go on being beautiful, even grow more beautiful, more dynamic. She wants me to marry Petra. That will make it safer for us both, do you see? What’s the matter?”

The obvious matter was that Lewis had torn his coat sleeve, a jagged rent, somehow on the rock.

“Mrs. Langley will mend it for you. She can do a magnificent mend. But how’d you manage it? You were just leaning—”

“Yes, just leaning, and hearing the ravings of a blasted idiot. What are you trying to do? Be funny, I suppose! But I don’t care for that kind of funniness. You can leave Petra out of it.”

Dick was amazed but not silenced by Lewis’ violence. “I felt surprised myself at first,” he owned. “But it isn’t so wild as you seem to think. And not a bit idiotic. I like Petra. I like her a lot. I didn’t used to. It’s only lately I’ve begun to understand her. She’s—why, she’s a stunning girl, really. And she isn’t in love with anybody else, that I know of. She’s not engaged to that McCloud person, in spite of Clare thinking for a while that she might be and was keeping it secret, the way she likes keeping things secret. But now Petra has told me herself she isn’t. And I’ve got Saint Paul with me: It’s better to marry than to burn.... There’s the whole Greek idea, too. Those Greek fellows, of course, weren’t faithful to their wives in the sense that I shall be faithful to Petra. But the situation was rather parallel, all the same. They had their intellectual and spiritual friendships with men or with women not their wives—and it succeeded. It was wise and sane. Clare thought you would be sympathetic—understand—”

“Look here, Dick! Prick me and wake me up. This isn’t real. If it is, if I’m awake, then somebody’d better advise Farwell to get in a good psychiatrist—but not me, thanks. I’m out of it. But Clare should be under observation. You too. You both had better leave Petra alone. Not that anything either of you could say or do will even so much as touch her wholesomeness! I’m a fool to get so excited about it. What do you say—shall we go back to the car and start for Boston—or shall we stick this out till the fog lifts? I’m perfectly ready to go back.”