THERE is one long road at Cinerea Lake, always dusty, with a sidewalk of planks. The hotel, with the appendant cottages, is on the one side, and a few old farmhouses, now boarding-houses, with a dozen little wooden shops, are on the other. Most of the shops sell novels, sweetmeats, embroidery work, and newspapers. There were not many men at Cinerea. It is not customary in America for men to join their wives and children on pleasure excursions. What few men there were seemed oppressed by the novelty of the position, and sat in chairs upon the piazza, with their feet upon the railing. They seldom ventured farther during the day. There was a stock telegraph instrument in the hall of the hotel, and an enterprising New York broker had an office in an ante-room. Vane noticed that every one of these gentlemen left their foot-rests on the verandah shortly after breakfast, and, following them to the nearest store, he learned that this activity was caused by a desire to purchase the evening papers of the day before, which arrived, as a written placard informed him, at 9.45 A.M. Vane himself asked for a paper, but got no answer from the young woman behind the counter, while a friend who was sitting with her, working, and eating pieces of chocolate from a paper bag upon her lap, stopped her embroidery a moment to stare at him rudely. Suddenly it dawned upon Vane that he had seen the faces of these two ladies at his hotel. They were sitting on a little piazza in front of the shop, behind a small counter, but the shop itself seemed to be a sort of club-room for the ladies of the place, and these were evidently guests. Vane apologized for his error with some inward amusement, but his speech was rewarded with a still blanker stare from the young woman with the chocolate.
So far, this “popular summer resort” promised more errors than entertainment. Vane had certainly never felt so lonely before as among this gay company. Work gives its own companionship, but idleness is gregarious. The place was full of girls of all styles of behavior and prettiness. Some were playing tennis, others making up companies for drives, others starting off for long walks. Vane had pictured the type of American girlhood as something fragile and delicate, but these had healthy faces and lithe young figures robed in flannel and untrammelled by the dressmakers’ art. They were bright, quick with their eyes, but far from ethereal. Vane himself went to walk, and, after following the road for a mile or so, entered a woody path, which, as a finger-post assured him, led to Diana’s baths.
He felt much in the mood for a meeting with a heathen goddess, and entered the forest accordingly. But he found nothing nearer Diana than Miss Morse and her friend, who were sitting reading with two young men. The path seemed to vanish where they sat, and Vane made hold to stop and ask one of the young men the way. They were slow of speech, and Miss Morse herself replied. She assured him that he was at his destination, and Vane found himself, in a moment, in conversation with her.
Diana’s Baths were formed by a small brook trickling over some mossy rocks and making a few pools in which Diana might possibly have wet her feet. Vane made this suggestion, which was received with much laughter, at the end of which he found himself on such a footing of intimacy that he was being introduced to Miss Morse’s companions: “Miss Westerhouse, may I introduce Mr.—— Mr.——” “Vane,” suggested he. “Mr. Vane, of New York, Miss Morse. Miss Westerhouse, Mr. Vane. Mr. Vane, Mr. Thomson and Mr. Dibble.” The young men nodded rather awkwardly. Miss Westerhouse made a place on the rock beside her, and Vane sat down wondering how the situation would be explained, and who had told her that he came from New York.
“I met you yesterday on your arrival, did I not?” Miss Morse went on.
Vane admitted that she had, and remembered the scene with the hotel clerk.
“Coming from New York, I fear you will find Cinerea Lake rather dull. We are after the season, you know.”
He hastened to assure her that he had found the place most attractive.
“It is getting to be rather too well known now, but it is pretty, though not so nice as it was. You meet all sorts of people here already.”
Vane felt duly instructed as to the social position of his companions, and assented, with much honesty, to her last statement.
“It is not very gay here, now. We have a hop twice a week.”
“That will be delightful,” said Vane with enthusiasm.
“Do you reside in New York?” Miss Westerhouse broke in.
“As much as I do anywhere,” said Vane. “I have to travel a great deal.” Vane noticed a sudden lack of interest in him after this remark, and fancied that they set him down for a commercial traveler. “I have only lived in New York of late years, and then only when I am not——on the road,” he added, as the humorous view of the situation struck him. A silence followed this remark, and a certain coldness; but Vane, who had a particularly comfortable place, leaning back on a mossy rock, made no motion to go. Finally Miss Westerhouse made an effort.
“Then you are not much acquainted in New York.”
“I have a good many business acquaintances.”
“Oh, I mean your lady friends.”
“I have none,” said Vane.
“Some very pleasant New Yorkers have been here,” said Miss Morse, “but they only stayed a few days. Mrs. Haviland and Miss Thomas——” Vane could not repress a slight movement. “Do you know them?” said the young lady with some interest.
“Miss Winifred Thomas?”
“This was Miss Baby——”
“It is the same person,” said Vane, with decision.
“Is she not just too lovely?” broke in again Miss Westerhouse, with enthusiasm. Vane could not but concur in this sentiment. Miss Morse’s interest in him seemed revived.
“I suppose we must go back to dinner now,” said she. “By the way, we are going to have a straw-ride this afternoon. Would you not like to come, Mr. Vane? The gentlemen are getting it up. Mr. Dibble, here, is chief manager——”
Vane said he should be delighted, and they rose to go. Picking up two books and a bonbonnière which lay upon the grass, he followed Miss Morse. He looked at the books as he went, and uttered a slight ejaculation. One, to be sure, was Lucile, but the other was a volume of Prosper Mérimée’s Lettres à une Inconnue.
On the way back Vane was presented to several other young ladies, and when he finally entered the hotel piazza, it was in company with a Miss Parsons, of Brooklyn, who in turn presented him to a Miss Storrs, of Cleveland, and left them, as she unnecessarily explained, to dress for dinner.
Vane was rather ashamed to own to himself that he was displeased at the acquaintance that seemed to have existed between Miss Thomas and his late companions. Little as he cared for Miss Thomas, there was certainly a world-wide difference between her and Miss Morse, Mr. Thomson and Mr. Dibble; and yet he could not bring himself to admit that he was snobbish or prejudiced. It was simply that the wealth and education of these young ladies had outstripped their breeding, while the young men were still seeking for the first. He pictured to himself Miss Thomas sitting in flannels at Diana’s Baths, and going on straw-rides with Mr. Dibble, and the idea was distasteful to him.
It was surely an odd chance that he should travel upon her wake in this way. Throughout the afternoon he occasionally caught himself wondering how she would appear in these surroundings. This thing was a mixture of Arcady and an American female college, with a touch of Vauxhall thrown in. And it was only six weeks since he had wandered in the moonlight of the Alhambra; and the harvest was hardly all gathered that had been ripening about the walls of Carcassonne. Vane wished that he could meet these people at home—that he could see their life really as it was. Was this, then, all? It could not be. There must be something more real behind it.
Vane could fancy, in the days when he had been in love, himself and her living in that out-of-the-way corner in France, in that forgotten nook sheltered on the backward shores of Spain, eddied in the flood of modern life and civilization, where he had wandered in the pine woods upon Monserrat. But this place, this painted wooden hotel, this company, seemed more foreign to him than anything in the Old World. What was it? What was it that gave the strange character to it all? Was he, then, such a foreigner that he could not understand it? Was even his love exotic, that it seemed impossible here?
The young man gave himself much mental trouble in getting at the secret of this American life. And, in the last analysis, it seemed unreal—unreal because it was temporary; because the old was going and the new had not yet come; because it was like the wooden houses and the temporary bridges, and the provisional social conventions, and the thin fashionable veneer of neo-conservatism—it was suffered to remain until the people found time and resolution to make a change.