The following Thursday afternoon Pearl stepped from the fast train to the platform of the Southampton station. Since the train reached Quogue she had been agreeably aware of the damp saltness in the air, which comes only from proximity to the open ocean. But now, on the platform, she smelled nothing but the fumes of innumerable exhausts, saw nothing but masses of automobiles crowding toward the station like a flock of parti-colored elephants. She stood dazed for a minute by the noise of self-starters and the crowd of arrivals, until, darting in and out under the elbows of chauffeurs and passengers, she saw a little bareheaded, barefooted figure in a dirty white dress edged with the finest Valenciennes lace. Pearl felt an instant conviction that this was her future charge.

"Antonia," she said in her deep voice, and the child made a rush for her.

"Are you Miss Exeter?" she exclaimed, and she gave a little boyish shake to her head. "I must say I think you are much more than pleasing. My mother said you'd be much less. She drew me a picture of what she thought you'd look like. Mother doesn't draw very well. I'm glad you're not like that. If I'd taken that as a guide I'd never have found you at all."

She beckoned to a large green touring car, and having arranged about Pearl's trunk and seen the bags put into the car, she herself sank beside Pearl on the wide back seat, while to steady herself on the slippery leather she raised one leg and clutched the back of the front seat With her bare flexible toes.

"How do you like Southampton?" she said.

If they had gone down the main street Pearl would have seen some old gray-shingled houses and elm trees that she would have honestly admired but they had turned eastward and were now driving down a perfectly straight road at the end of which, through a dip in the dunes, the deep blue of the afternoon sea could be seen. The country was flat in every direction except the north, where a wooded rise in the ground cut off the horizon. To be candid, Pearl did not greatly admire the prospect, but she said tactfully, "I love the sea."

"Can you swim?"

"Yes."

"Can you play tennis?"

"Yes."

"Can you drive a car?"

"No."

"Good!" said the child with her friendly smile. "I'm glad I've found something you can't do. Beckett," she said, leaning forward and shouting in the ear of the chauffeur, "I mean to teach Miss Exeter to drive."

"Maybe it'd be as well to learn yourself first, miss," said the man coldly.

Antonia sighed.

"Beckett's cross," she said, "because I bent the fender coming up. My legs are too short to reach the foot brake in a hurry. Beckett knows that, but he doesn't make allowances."

"Is it safe for you to drive, then?" asked Pearl.

"Well, if you ask me, no," said Antonia candidly; "but as long as mother lets me do it, of course I'm going to. I wonder if you're going to like us. I don't see how anyone could like Dolly."

"What's the matter with Dolly?"

"Oh, about everything," answered Antonia. "I'll tell you the kind of person she is: If you forget something she asks you to do she treats you as if you were a moron to have forgotten it, and if she forgets something you ask her to do she treats you as if you were a moron to have asked her to do it."

"There must be something to be said for her," Pearl suggested.

Antonia considered the question. She was, as her uncle had said, the justest of created beings.

"I suppose there must be, but I don't know what it is. Then there's Durland—he's great—only he doesn't notice me much. I wish I were a boy. I want to wear trousers and be free."

"You seem to me pretty fairly free."

Antonia laughed.

"That's funny," she said. "I mean it's funny that you said that exactly the way Uncle Anthony talks—that gentle tone that makes you feel like nothing at all. Do you like Uncle Anthony? Do you think he's handsome?"

"Yes, indeed I do," answered Pearl, with the modest enthusiasm which she thought under the circumstances Augusta would have allowed herself.

"So do I," said Antonia. "So does Miss Wellington, whose mother has the house next us. She took it before she knew Uncle Anthony was going to be away all summer—at least that's what mother and I think. Miss Wellington told me she thought him handsome and she said 'And you can tell him I said so,' but I didn't—for rather a spiteful reason; I thought she wanted me to."

"It sounds that way to me, too," said Pearl.

"I'm glad you like him," Antonia went on. "He likes you too. He telephoned mother about you. He said he had found a pearl—wasn't that funny?" It was funnier than Antonia knew. "So now mother always speaks of you as the priceless pearl. Mother's rather amusing, like that. He said you were not so much on looks—just pleasing, he said. But I think you are perfectly beautiful. Do you think you're beautiful, Miss Exeter?"

This was the first crisis. Pearl knew that if she said no Antonia would distrust her honesty, and if she said yes it might be used against her. So she compromised.

"I'll answer that question the day I leave," she said.

"I'll tell you something funny about that," said Antonia. "Perhaps I oughtn't to, but I'm going to. Uncle Anthony made mother promise not to send you away until he came back, no matter what happened; but mother says she knows a way to get round that if the worst comes to the worst. You see, I don't want to hurt your feelings; but we all felt it was rather hard on us to have a governess at all in summer. Mother thinks it's hard too. She says it's just one of Uncle Anthony's ideas. She says a man can't take an interest in anything unless he thinks he's running it. So she just lets him think he runs the family, and then when he's away she does what she thinks best. This is our gate now. What do you think of the house? We only rent it. There's Durland going in for a swim before dinner. I wonder if he'd wait for us. Durland! Durland!"

It was quite extraordinary the volume of sound that could issue from so small a person as Antonia. She sprang out of the car over the closed door and ran round the house toward the ocean, while Pearl entered the front door alone.

A slim, gray-haired figure in delft blue came out of a neighboring room and said "Good heavens, you are not Miss Exeter, are you?"

Pearl smiled her most winning smile.

"Won't I do?" she said.

But merriment did not seem quite in order. Mrs. Conway's manners were perfect, but she was not going to begin by being any more friendly than she could help.

She answered politely, "Oh, perfectly, I feel sure. Only you do not look quite as my brother's description led me to expect; but then men are not very good at describing women."

Her hair, prematurely gray, gave more the effect of powder. Her brows were arched so much that she seemed to be looking up from under a thatch. They were blue eyes; not quite China blue, as Pearl had heard the family eyes described; they were sad, appealing eyes, which kept veiling themselves in an effort to seem dignified and remote. Yes, Pearl thought, there was something pathetic about Mrs. Conway—something that made her feel just a little bit as Alfred's lost paw made her feel; so she beamed gently down upon her new employer while that lady continued:

"I don't see how Antonia ever found you—from his account. Fortunately the child is wonderfully quick or you would be waiting at the station still. Where is she, by the way?"

Pearl explained that she had dashed down to the beach to ask her brother to wait for them, and would it be all right if she went swimming too? Over Mrs. Conway's shoulder Pearl could catch a glimpse of the piazza, and beyond that the faultless blue rim of the horizon; and as she talked she could hear close by the thud and hiss as a wave went up the beach. She longed to be in the water.

"Oh, yes, go if you want to," said Mrs. Conway. She was not exactly cordial. Gentle, friendly people like Edna Conway always go too far when they try to be cold; they have no experience in the rÔle. "But try not to keep them waiting too long. My children hate to be kept waiting."

"I do myself," answered Pearl gayly.

"Really?" said Mrs. Conway, and the arched eyebrows went up under the gray thatch.

Pearl saw she had said the wrong thing; but whether it was wrong for a governess to dislike being kept waiting, or presumptuous to put herself into the same interesting group as the Conway children, she had no idea. She did not much care either. The smooth blue sea was waiting for her, and she went springing upstairs, slinging off a string of beads—translucent pearl-gray glass, the color of her eyes—and thinking to herself that it was a mercy she had had sense enough to put her bathing dress in her bag. She tore it out from the lower layers so violently that shoes and brushes flew into the air like stones from a volcano; and in a surprisingly short time she was running through the deserted sitting room, out across the piazza, down the steep wooden steps to the beach.

At the edge of the water Durland was standing with his back to her. Although he was a thin boy of fifteen in a striped red-and-blue bathing suit, he was standing with one knee advanced, his hand on his hip and a cigarette dangling from his lip, as if he were the late King Edward VII at Homburg. Beside him, Antonia was digging a hole like a dog—possibly her sleeping hole for the evening—and talking all the time. She was talking about Miss Exeter.

Durland was deeply opposed to the idea of Miss Exeter. In the first place he was opposed to women, as a prisoner is opposed to stone walls. He was surrounded by them, dominated by them. His mother, his mother's maid, who had been with them forever, his sister Dorothy—they all bullied him and cut him off from his fellow men. Sometimes, with disgust, he heard himself using the feminized vocabulary of the women about him, and though he was as masculine as possible—smoked and everything—he could not shake off their influence. Then he hated governesses as representing that most emasculated form of that most emasculated thing—learning. His friends had already made fun of him about it. It had been said on the beach, "I hear they're getting a governess to keep you in order, Durlie." He had decided to make it clear that he had nothing to do with the woman. He doubted if he even allowed her to teach him algebra, though as a matter of fact he wanted to pass his examination. And then, last but not least of his reasons, he felt opposed to anything that Antonia so wildly recommended, because that was one way of keeping her in the complete subjection to him in which she lived.

So while she chattered of Miss Exeter and her beauty and her youngness and the sort of niceness of the way in which she looked at you, he stood gazing out to sea as if the best he could do for his little sister was just not to hear her at all.

Then Antonia cried "Here she is!" and executed a four-footed leap on finger tips and toes; and then Durland was aware of a circular motion of white arms and long white legs whirling past his shoulder, and the new governess had plunged into the Atlantic.

This really wouldn't do at all—governess doing hand-springs. It looked peculiar, and yet it did pique the curiosity. He sauntered a step nearer with a slow, sophisticated, loose-kneed walk. Miss Exeter and Antonia were behaving foolishly, and noisily, too—splashing each other and laughing. He himself went in as if the object of a swim were not to disturb one unnecessary drop of water. He swam a stroke or two under the surface, and coming up out of a wave found himself face to face with Pearl. The wonderful radiance of those gray eyes came to rest on his; and his heart melted within him like a pat of butter. It wasn't just her beauty though that would probably have been enough; but it was the immense, generous friendliness toward all the world when the world would allow her to be friendly that warmed and comforted his young spirit. He gazed at her, and suddenly the gaze was cut short by Pearl's decision to stand on her head. Two white feet clapped together in front of Durland's nose.

If she had been less beautiful he would have said to himself that she really did not know how to behave. As it was, he thought that she would certainly lay herself open to unkind criticism. He wanted to protect her, and he was not without tact. He said, when she came to the surface, blinking the water from her long, matted eyelashes, "It's nice to have our own beach, isn't it?—to be able to do what we like—stand on our heads or anything without being talked about."

She did not seem to get it at all.

"Let's swim out," she said, and laid her ear upon the face of the sea as if she were a baby listening to the ticking of a watch. He swam beside her, looking into her face, and she gave him a friendly little beam every now and then. It was wonderful to be under no necessity of suppressing her cheerful kindness of heart. "Let it do its deadly work" was her feeling.

They had a good long swim, and when they came in were met by Mrs. Conway at the head of the steps. She was dressed for dinner in a faint pink tea gown with pearls.

She said civilly, but all on one note, "Dinner is ready, Miss Exeter."

Yes, she who had so often waited uncomplainingly for hours for her children, pretending that the clocks were wrong, or the dinner hour changed, or that the mistake had been hers, was now feeling outraged at being obliged to wait ten minutes for this governess her brother had so obstinately insisted on engaging.

"Oh, I won't be a minute, Mrs. Conway," said Pearl, feeling genuinely sorry to have inconvenienced anyone, but not feeling at all guilty as Mrs. Conway wanted her to feel.

"Yes, I do hope you'll contrive not to be very long," she said, and could not understand the cause for a dark look her son gave her as he pursued his shivering way upstairs.

She went into the sitting room, where her daughter Dorothy was already waiting. It was not a miracle that Dolly was ready on time, but a phenomenon to be explained by the fact that she had a bridge engagement immediately after dinner.

She was a pretty, round-faced girl, rather like her mother, except that her hair was still a natural light brown, and her eyes were brown too. She did not raise her head, as her mother entered, from the fashion paper which she was languidly studying.

"Not a very promising beginning, is it?" said Mrs. Conway. She knew Dolly would be annoyed and she wished to cut herself off completely from the guilty one. "Do you suppose she's going to keep us waiting for dinner half an hour every evening?"

Dolly bent her head to examine a picture of an ermine wrap.

"Oh, well, mother," she said, "what can you expect if you give in to every whim of Uncle Anthony's?"

Mrs. Conway made a pathetic little grimace—pathetic because it was so obviously intended to win Dolly to her side—to make the girl feel that she and her mother had a secret alliance against the world at large.

"You'll find, my dear," she said, "that in dealing with men it's easier to yield at the moment and find a way out at leisure."

But Dolly, who had not even looked up long enough to see the grimace, answered with a bitter little laugh, "It may be easier for you, but not for us. We have to suffer. That's the trouble with you, mother—you think of no one in the world but yourself."

Her mother did not answer—she could not. Tears rose in her blue eyes. She had enormous capacity for being hurt. Strangely enough, there was something in her that drove those she loved to say exactly the thing that would hurt her most. It had always been so with her husband, and now it was so with her children.

A misplaced fortitude always led her to hide the fact that she was hurt.

She said now with false gayety, "Well, my dear, I hope some day you will find someone who loves you even better than I do, then."

"I'm sure I hope so," said Dolly, turning the page.

Her manner suggested that if she could not do that much her life would indeed be a failure.

Mrs. Conway stepped out on the piazza. That was the way—you gave up your life to making your children happy, to shielding them from grief and anxiety, and then they blamed you and hurt you horribly for something that was not at all your fault. She felt a moment of resentment toward her brother. Why had Anthony insisted on this silly plan? She had been too considerate of Anthony's feelings; she ought to have refused to have a governess at all. It was much wiser in this world to be stern and cruel. She decided to be stern and to begin with Miss Exeter, who entered the sitting room at this moment. She was wearing a plain cream-colored dress out of which her lovely head—all brown and rose color and gold—seemed strangely bright colored.

"I suppose you're Dolly," she said in her deep warm voice, and held out an open hand.

Dolly, like most young people, estimated beauty as the best of gifts. She might have been almost as much captured by Pearl's as her brother had been, except that her ego was taken up with the outrage of her being kept waiting—she, the most important person in the house, who had taken the trouble not only to order dinner on time but—what did not always happen—to be on time herself.

She rose, and allowing a limp hand to pass rapidly through Miss Exeter's, she said, "Do let's go in to dinner, mother."

"Yes, indeed," said her mother, coming in rapidly from the piazza. "We dine at eight, Miss Exeter. Another evening I'm sure you will be on time."

This was not perhaps a very terrible beginning to a rÉgime of sternness; but to Durland, just getting down, it appeared one of the most disgusting exhibitions of slave driving that he had ever heard.

"It is entirely my fault that we are late," he said, giving his mother a steady, brave look.

She answered irrelevantly, "Why, Durland, how nice you look! Are you going anywhere this evening?"

"Very likely," he answered coldly. He thought to himself, "Why must she give Miss Exeter the impression that I look like a cowboy generally?" He was of course going nowhere.

So, having completely alienated her two elder children—Antonia had early supper by herself—Mrs. Conway found herself obliged to direct her conversation to the interloper. She had her revenge, if she had only known it, by talking about her brother, questioning Miss Exeter about him. Had he seemed very much rushed? Did he say anything about his golf clubs? Wasn't it a delightful office? Wonderful! So cool in summer.

Pearl hazarded that the harbor was very beautiful, and learned that Mr. Wood's office looked north—up the Hudson. She must be careful.

Durland inquired with a friendly grin whether Uncle Anthony had frightened her to death.

"Frightened me?" said Pearl, trying to gain time.

"Some people are awfully afraid of him."

"Naughty little boys are," said Dolly.

It always annoyed her to see her brother sitting at the foot of the dinner table. They had fought about it for five years—whether she as eldest child or he as the only man in the house ought to occupy this place of honor.

"I'm not afraid of him," said Durland.

"Oh, are you a naughty little boy?" said Dolly, laughing in an irritating way.

Mrs. Conway, to avert war, began talking about the day's schedule—the problem of how to work in a few lessons without interfering with any of the more important pleasures of her children.

"Antonia first, I think. Wouldn't that be your idea, Dolly—Antonia at half past nine? Dolly and Durland sometimes sleep rather late—so good for them, I think—but Antonia is up early. She reads sometimes from five o'clock. She reads a great deal—everything."

"Quite the little genius, according to mother," said Dolly.

"She is clever," answered Mrs. Conway passionately. "I don't know why you two are always so disagreeable about your little sister."

"Because you spoil her so, mother," said Dolly.

"Because she's so dirty, mother," said Durland.

Mrs. Conway made this attack a means of aligning herself with her children against the governess.

"Oh, well," she said, "that is all going to be changed now. Miss Exeter is going to make us all over. Antonia is to be clean and tidy, though why in the world your uncle thinks it desirable for a child of eleven to think of nothing but clothes I can't see. And Durland is to made into a mathematician. I suppose I'm very ignorant, but I never could see what good algebra does a person—all about greyhounds leaping after hares, and men doing pieces of work at seventy-five cents a day. I wish I could find some like that. Poor Durland, like so many people with a creative turn of mind, simply cannot do mathematics."

"More people than creative geniuses are poor at mathematics," said Pearl genially; and Durland, afraid that she would identify him with his mother in this ridiculous point of view, looked into those pools of gray light and said modestly that he was just a dub at problems.

"Then at half past eleven," Mrs. Conway went on, "you'll be free to take Antonia to the beach—the public beach, where she likes to get a swim and see her little friends."

"Fight a round or two with her little enemies," said her brother.

"She's only fought once this summer," said his mother. "And I for one think she was perfectly right. Maud is the most annoying child—ugly and impertinent like her mother, and very badly brought up."

"Well, that's not a patch on what they think about Antonia," said Durland, and he turned to Miss Exeter. "Gee, it was great! This Maud child said something rude about Antonia's bare feet, and she sailed in and landed her one on the jaw; and they fought so that the nurses and governesses all ran screaming away and the life-saving men had to come in and separate them."

Mrs. Conway hated this story about her youngest child.

She rose from table in order to interrupt it, observing that Durland needn't worry, as now they were all going to be made perfect.

Pearl on the whole felt encouraged. Augusta, with all her efficiency, could not have swung this job, she thought. It required a solid, almost irrational good temper, which Augusta did not possess. Mrs. Conway would have rendered Augusta acid and powerless in one evening. Pearl was not so efficient in certain ways, but she had good temper and a robust will.

She and Durland went into the sitting room while Mrs. Conway was getting Dolly off to her bridge party. Durland did what, alas, men have been doing for many centuries—he attempted to impress the object of his affection by doing one of the things most certain to alienate her. He stood before her, lighting a cigarette, shaking the match deliberately in the air, his legs rather wide apart. Pearl, who had sunk into a nice deep chair, sprang up and put her hand on his shoulder.

"Oh, don't smoke," she said.

Hundreds of women had said that to him. Even the lovely Caroline Temple—his former love—had said that her parents had forbidden her to have him at the house on account of his smoking; such a bad example.

"Caroline," he had said quietly, "I simply do openly what all the others do secretly."

He had not wavered about it. Neither had her parents. He and Caroline met at the tennis club and at the beach—no longer at her house. But he had never thought of changing his habits. His cigarette was to him what a car is to a theatrical star—a symbol of greatness. He was firm now, even under the pleading of a new idol.

"I'm afraid I can't give it up," he said. "I'm afraid it has too much of a grip on me for that."

He frowned as one who, looking inward, saw nothing but vice and ruin. He was disappointed to find that she just let it drop—as if she were not vitally interested in saving him. But before he had time to commit the natural mistake of asking her why she did not rescue him from his worse self, his mother came back into the room.

Her first words were, "Do you think that a good picture of my brother?"

Something mocking and teasing in her tone unnerved Pearl a little; so that instead of following the direction of Mrs. Conway's eyes she said rather wildly, "Where?"

Durland came to her rescue by politely giving her a large silver frame in which was the photograph of a man she was prepared to admire, and so she did admire him—so much that something tense was apparent as she gazed into those China-blue eyes, which looked—if one had not had private information—as if they were brown.

Mrs. Conway watched with sly amusement. The mocking quality in her question had not arisen, as Pearl half feared, from any doubt as to the new governess' identity, but rather from the suspicion that there was more between her brother and this lovely creature than had been confessed. Like many gentle sweet people, Edna Conway was extremely suspicious; her mind ran rapidly over a situation, examining though not necessarily believing all the darkest possibilities. She did not actually suspect her brother of finding a safe home for a dangerous girl during his absence, but she did say to herself—perhaps not unnaturally, "There's more in this than meets the eye."

A voice from the piazza called, "Did Anthony's pearl arrive?" And a woman in evening dress entered.

"Yes, Cora, this is she," said Mrs. Conway, and she added with a certain hint of malice, "You ought to know each other—both so consecrated to doing whatever Anthony wants done. Miss Exeter, Miss Wellington."

Miss Wellington's emotions were clearly written on her face. She had been in love with Anthony ever since he succeeded. This which sounds like a paradox was the simple truth. To her, success was not necessarily financial—though Wood's had had this agreeable aspect—but importance and preËminence were to her as essential elements in male attraction as feminine beauty is to most men. When she was eighteen and Anthony still in the School of Mines there had been sentimental scenes which had left her cold. She occasionally referred to them as "the time when you thought you wanted to marry me," and he did not contradict her. He had thought he did. He still admired her—she was elegant in appearance, beautifully dressed, competent in all the practical aspects of life. If she had married someone else he would have said to her, "Your marriage was a great blow to me, Cora. I had always fancied that some day you and I——" But he never would have said it until after she was safely married.

She had, however, no intention of marrying anyone else—for the simple reason that Anthony was by far the most attractive man of importance that she knew. Her feelings on discovering Pearl—the young person she had heard described as being of merely pleasing appearance—to be an exuberant beauty, and discovering her, moreover, staring sentimentally at Anthony's picture, were not suspicions; she had the conviction of disaster. She couldn't be cordial; and, Pearl, who had the kind of sensitiveness that comes from generosity, not from egotism, saw that the moment had come for her to go upstairs and write her first letter to the man whose face she liked so much.

She had always been a poor correspondent. She had never enjoyed writing before, but now the idea of pouring herself out—or rather not herself, but her observation of a situation in which he was vitally interested—delighted her. All of us, it has been said, can write well if we have something interesting to say. What Pearl had to say could not fail to be interesting to the man she was writing to. There was no motive for caution. At last she had found a man with whom she could be candid and natural. Late into the night the sound of a portable typewriter could be heard ticking from the room of the new governess.

It was not easy to put a routine into operation in the Conway household. At half past nine, the hour set for Antonia's lessons, Antonia was nowhere to be found. Pearl at last ventured to tap at Mrs. Conway's bedroom door. Mrs. Conway was sitting up in bed, in white satin and yellow lace, with her breakfast tray on her lap.

In response to the news that her youngest child was missing, she answered, "She's probably gone crabbing. I'm afraid that if you want to do lessons in summer you will have to get up a little earlier. She was out of the house by seven, I dare say." And she smiled maliciously.

Pearl saw that coÖperation was unlikely, hostility probable, and withdrew.

Durland, her second pupil, presented himself a little ahead of time. He came downstairs at ten, drank a cup of black coffee and ate a peach. He was recklessly wearing his last pair of clean white trousers. He was paler and more like a young bird than usual. He, too, had his problems.

While willing to oblige Miss Exeter in every particular, while eager to help her and make her appear a worker of miracles, her mere proximity prevented his mind from functioning at all. Do what she could, her efforts to get him thinking about the problem of three men, A, B and C, who, working together, could do a piece of work in three days, was like trying to crank a dead automobile. She tried beaming upon him, she tried being severe; either way his intense emotion flooded his mental processes.

She thought, "I've solved worse problems than this, but I'm sure I don't know what to do."

He himself gave her the clew. She had explained for the third time that if you let x equal the number of days that it took A, working alone—when he interrupted her. He was sitting beside her, leaning his head on his hand and staring at her in a maze of admiration.

Suddenly he said, "Do you like teaching, Miss Exeter?"

"I like teaching girls," she answered with a quick inspiration.

He drove his unwilling intelligence to take in this incredible statement.

"Girls," he said, opening his honest blue eyes and wrinkling his forehead. "Why girls?"

"They're so much cleverer than boys."

She tossed it off as if were a well-known and generally admitted fact. He was gentle with her.

"People think just the opposite," he said.

"Men do."

"I think you're wrong about that, really," Durland said. "I think anyone—even a very just man like Uncle Anthony—would say that women can't think, at least not like men."

"Would he, indeed?" said Pearl. "Well, I don't know him; but he may be the kind of man who prefers inferior people of both sexes."

Durland, unable to believe she really thought this, looked wistfully into her face for a sign of relenting.

"Of course," he said, "you are very unusual. You must not judge other women by yourself."

"I was fifteenth in my class," said Pearl. "Quite stupid compared to the others; but even I never had any trouble with algebra. I put my mind on it. That the trouble with boys—they're so scattered."

This was cruel, considering who had scattered him; but like many cruelties it worked.

As the hour finished, Dolly came downstairs and said, without looking at anyone, that she herself was going immediately in the motor to Shinnecock for her golf lesson and could not delay an instant; but if Antonia were there and ready there was no objection to dropping her and Miss Exeter at the public beach. At that moment Antonia, who, just as her mother had suggested, had been crabbing since dawn, appeared on the lawn, streaked with seaweed and exuding a faintly ancient and fishy smell. Dolly was like steel and would not allow her a moment for changing; and so, dropping her crabs and nets on the piazza, Antonia with Miss Exeter got into the car after Dolly, and were duly dropped at the little group of dark-red bathing houses that formed the entrance to the public beach.

Pearl found the child, in spite of her personal untidiness, a most agreeable companion. She had read widely and with imagination. She knew a great deal of poetry—rather martial poetry—by heart; all of Horatius, for instance, which she said she usually recited to herself in the dentist's chair and from which she gained comfort.

They were walking up the wide steps to the bathing house as she spoke, and she stopped and bent down to examine a boy's bicycle—she was a connoisseur of bicycles.

They came in sight of the beach now—all set out with bright-colored umbrellas like gay poisonous mushrooms. It was the hour when the beach was given over to children.

Pearl was thinking that it looked very pretty, when once again she heard Antonia's clarion voice break out at her elbow.

"Hi, there, you kids! Leave that fort alone! It's mine!"

She darted down the narrow boardwalk toward an immense hole in the sand, scattering a band of neatly dressed children, much as the effete Romans were scattered by the first onslaught of the northern barbarians. Pearl could not help laughing as she saw children run to their governesses or snatched back by their nurses; but the next moment she was sorry, for she saw that it was being said in various tongues that Antonia was quite the worst brought-up child in the world. Pearl was nothing if not a partisan, and she was already completely on Antonia's side.

She and Antonia were supposed to bathe early so as to leave the two Conway bathhouses free for Mrs. Conway and Dolly when they appeared at a later and more fashionable hour. "Everything in our family is done for Dolly," said Antonia when she was finally dragged out of the water. "It makes me tired the way mother indulges every whim of hers."

Rebellious or not, however, Antonia was dressed—as much dressed as she ever was, which was about three-quarters as much as other little girls—by half after twelve.

She and Pearl went back to the beach and sat down under the red-and-black-striped umbrella which the life-saving man had stuck in the sand for them as if he were about to do a pole vault with it. And presently Durland, ready for his swim, came and plopped down beside them, and immediately a girl in a one-piece tomato-colored bathing dress rose from another part of the beach and came and sat on the other side of him.

Antonia, with a thin brown arm, still smelling very slightly of crabs in spite of her swim, clasped about Pearl's neck, blew in her governess' ear the information that this was Caroline Temple, Durland's best girl. Like so many courtships, this one, to the outside world, seemed to be carried on principally by the lady. She neither looked at nor spoke to Pearl and Antonia.

To Durland she said, "Shall we go in now?"

Durland was digging a small hole near Miss Exeter's hand; his shoulder was turned to Caroline and he did not shift it as he replied, "You can if you like."

There was a pause. Apparently she didn't like, for she did not move, and after a time she said in the same tone of lowered confidence, "I have the car here. I'll drive you home."

"Thanks," said Durland. "I'm on my bicycle." Another pause.

"Shall we play tennis this afternoon?"

"I may," answered Durland.

Pearl began to feel her sex pride wounded. She bent forward, and beaming upon the newcomer, she said, "You play tennis?"

Caroline just glanced at her.

"Of course I do," she said.

She had not the smallest intention of being rude, for she was a sweet-tempered child; even less did it occur to her to be jealous of an elderly woman of twenty-four; but her mind, concentrated upon the pursuit of Durland, was rendered irritable by inconsequential interruptions. Durland, however, though no critic of manners, was aware that a gesture of friendship from a goddess had not been gratefully received.

"You might be civil about it," he said, and then looking up at Pearl, he asked in a softened tone of adoration whether she would like to play tennis that afternoon.

"Doubles?" said Caroline, as if this were, of course, possible though utterly undesirable.

"Would you like to play doubles?" Durland asked again.

"If it is convenient to your mother," said Pearl.

Durland dismissed such an idea as repellent to him and, glancing over his shoulder to Caroline, he said, "All right. Miss Exeter and I will play you—if you can get a fourth."

It was not the way Caroline had designed the set and she said so. She said clearly and rather complainingly that she had expected to play with Durland, and yet she did not seem wounded so much as thwarted.

"I'm sure I don't know whom I can get," she said.

"I suppose you can get the faithful Wally—anyone can get Wally."

"I thought you did not like Wally."

"I?" said Durland, as if it were far beneath him ever to have been aware of Wally's existence; and without any further answer he got up and walked into the Atlantic so suddenly that Miss Temple, scrambling as rapidly as possible to her feet, was several yards behind him as he dived into his first wave.

"Isn't she pretty?" said Antonia. "She's been his best girl for two summers."

"I don't think he's very nice to her," said Pearl.

"Well," said Antonia, giving one of her little shakes of the head, "it would seem wonderful to me if Durlie spoke to me at all. However, it may be over. Like what Shakespeare says—one foot on land. Next time I have a chance I'll look and see if her picture is still in the back of his watch."

Presently they were back in the same order—Durland first, and Miss Temple following. He sat dripping, and taking a cigarette from a package he had left on the sand, he began groping for a match.

"Oh, Durland," said Miss Temple, "I do wish you wouldn't smoke. It isn't good for you. It looks so badly." Durland gave a short laugh that seemed to say that if he had regarded public opinion he would have made of life a very different thing. In her distress Caroline turned to the stranger whose presence she had so far refused to acknowledge. "Don't you think it's wrong for him to smoke?" she said.

It was Pearl's moment.

"Why, no," she answered, "I can't see anything wrong about it."

She put out a lazy hand and took one from the little paper envelope. Durland's hand, with the match in it, was arrested.

"But—you're not going to smoke—here? On the public beach?"

"Isn't it allowed?" asked Pearl, all innocence. "It must be—you are smoking. Let me have a match."

"I haven't a match," he said, and threw away his own cigarette so that she could not get a light from that. It was an important moment in his life. He thought rapidly. "I hope you won't think me fresh or anything," he said, "but I don't think a governess ought to smoke, if you know what I mean—not in public anyhow."

She wasn't angry, only thoughtful.

"Well, that's only your opinion."

It touched him that she knew so little of the world—or of her own position. He said gently, "I'm afraid you'd find it was everybody's opinion."

"Ought you to be so much influenced by the opinion of other people?"

"Yes, indeed," he answered. The cigarette with which she was still playing might separate them forever. His mother, he knew, was just waiting for a good excuse to send her away, and where could she find a better one?

She argued it further, tapping the cigarette on her hand as if she were about to place it between her lips.

"But you don't pay any attention when people say you oughtn't to smoke."

Even then he did not know that a trap had been set for him. On the contrary, he thought he had an original idea of some beauty when he said impulsively, "I tell you what, I'll swear off if you will."

She seemed to debate it through an agonizing second or two, while he looked at her with dog-like eyes. Then she smiled and gave him a strong hand.

"All right," she said. "That's a bargain."

Durland felt flooded with joy—not only at having saved a beloved woman but at having done it in just the right way. He picked up the package of cigarettes and flung it toward the sea. It did not quite reach the water and Caroline sprang up and brought it back to him.

"I suppose you thought that was empty," she said.

He tossed it away again without thanking her, but at last to her repeated clamors he yielded the information that he had given up smoking.

"Oh, Durland," she said, "now you can come to the house again. Is that why you did it?"

He did not want to deceive the girl, but he could not resist the temptation of allowing her to deceive herself. He did not answer directly; but rising, he said, "Anyone who wishes to swim to the barrels with me may now do so."

It was more like an invitation than anything he had said all morning, and they were soon swimming side by side.

Presently Mrs. Conway in a dark-blue silk bathing dress with ruffles appeared and dropped a string of pearls into the lap of the governess as if they had been beads. Pearl had never had such pearls in her hands before. They were heavier—much heavier than she had imagined, and brighter, more iridescent, better worth looking at. She was not given to envy, but she was aware of thinking that there was something slightly wrong with a world where Mrs. Conway had pearls and she had not. Antonia insisted on her putting them around her neck.

"It's much safer—you can't drop them in the sand—Cousin Cora always does—that's Miss Wellington; she's no relation, but she likes us to call her cousin—she wants us to call her aunt, but mother says, 'Wait till she is.'"

"Oh," said Pearl, conscious of a distinct pang, "is she going to be?"

Antonia gave one of her head shakes.

"Mother says, 'Say not the struggle nought availeth.' Older people make a lot of fun of their best friends, don't they?"

"Would you like her for an aunt?" said Pearl.

"Yes and no," Antonia replied. "I think the wedding would be fun, and I think I'd be a bridesmaid or something; but as a family we prefer to keep Uncle Anthony to ourselves. Mother says if he marries Cora we wouldn't lose him as much as if he married a stranger. There was a Russian actress one year, with red, hair; I didn't think her a bit pretty. She used to send mother flowers and seats for her plays. They were all pretty sad though. Then there was another time—she was married this time, but mother said——"

Antonia broke off to call Pearl's attention to Dolly, who was coming down the boardwalk in a bathing dress of as many hues as Joseph's coat. Everything about her was bent—her back, her knees, her elbows, her fingers, and every crook was obviously intended to charm the young man by whose side she was walking, who was staring out to sea and very thoughtfully putting cotton in his ears. Even Pearl, indifferent as she then supposed herself to be to all men, could not but admit that he was as splendid an example of young blond manhood as she had ever seen. Then as he came nearer she saw a certain pale red-rimmedness about the eyes, and she thought, "He's the kind you'd have to describe as handsome, and yet if anyone else did, you'd say, 'Oh, do you think him handsome? I don't like his looks at all.'"

Antonia meantime was pouring his life history into her ear.

"Allen Williams. He's twenty-one and has been a freshman for two years—isn't be handsome?—and very vicious—gambles and drinks and everything. I heard the Williams' governess telling someone the other day that Monsieur Allen was dÉjÀ trÈs connu dans le monde—le monde gal—gal—something or other. I wish I knew more French. You can't really tell much what goes on on the beach unless you know French. Of course, he's just amusing himself with Dolly."

"I tell you what I think," said Pearl, suddenly becoming aware that she had been staring, and not only this, but also stared at. "I think it's horrid of you to be against your own sister."

"But look at the way she's giggling and wriggling. I feel ashamed of her," said Antonia.

"That's the very time you ought to stick up for her," said Pearl.

"Well, it's a point of view," said Antonia. "That's what Uncle Anthony always says when he doesn't agree with you but is too lazy to argue it out."

Dolly and Mr. Williams had reached them by this time. Dolly was for passing by, but Williams stopped and said in a voice clearly audible, "And who is the beautiful girl in the pearls?"

Dolly's voice was too low to be audible. She stopped. Spoiled and selfish she might be, but she was at heart a lady. She introduced Mr. Williams to Miss Exeter with perfect civility. Williams took Pearl's hand and looked at her with something fierce and blank in his eyes.

Oh, how well she knew that look!