Presently she turned into a byway, passed the grove, and was lost to view
I seated myself, my eye on the spot where I had seen her disappear. Somebody greeted me from the hotel lawn. I returned the salutation mechanically and went on gazing at that spot. I knew that I was making a fool of myself, but I could not help it. My will-power was gone as it might from the effect of some drug
When she reappeared at last and I saw her coming back I crossed over to the hotel veranda so as to be near her when she should arrive. I found several of the boarders there, including the lawyer, the photographer, and a jewelry merchant of my acquaintance. We all watched her coming. At one moment, as she leveled her opera-glass at a bird, the lawyer said: "Studying birds. She's a great girl for studying. She is."
"Studying nothing!" the photographer jeered. "It's simply becoming to her.
It's effective, don't you know."
The lawyer smiled sagely, as if what Mendelson said was precisely what he himself had meant to intimate
I was inclined to think that Mendelson was right, but this did not detract from the force that drew me to Miss Tevkin
When she reached the veranda the lawyer gallantly offered her a chair, but she declined it, pleasantly, and went indoors. Her high heels had left deep, dear-cut imprints in a small patch of damp, sandy ground near the veranda.
This physical trace of her person fascinated me. It was a trace of stern hostility, yet I could not keep my eye away from it. I gazed and gazed at those foot-prints of hers till I seemed to be growing stupid and dizzy. "Am I losing my head?" I said to myself. "Am I obsessed? Why, I saw her yesterday for the first time and I have scarcely spoken to her. What the devil is the matter with me?"
After breakfast we returned to the veranda. The jewelry-dealer and the lawyer bored me unmercifully. Finally I was saved from them by the arrival of the Sunday papers, but my reading was soon disturbed by the intrusions of a mother and her marriageable daughter. There was no escape. I had to lay down my paper and let them torture me. There was a striking family resemblance between the two, yet the daughter was as homely as the mother was pretty. "She isn't as prepossessing as her ma, of course," the older woman seemed to be saying to me, "but she's charming, all the same, isn't she?"