One Sunday he brought Lester in to lunch with the family and was satisfied with the result. Even his father had fallen a victim to Lester’s charm. As for the young ladies of Boston and Cambridge whom Lester met at the numerous parties that he graced with his presence, half of them sang his praises and half of them denounced him as spoiled, conceited, or insincere.
Katharine Vance told David that she did not like Lester Wallace because he was too much a man of the world.
David had come to be on terms of intimacy with all the Bradley family except Marion, and possibly he was piqued by her consistent formality. He spent his summer vacations, as it were, at the Bradleys’ door; on their estate at Buzzard’s Bay there was a small house that they called the cottage and that they had always rented to Mr. Dean. Now they enlarged it and rented it to the “Dean-Iveses,” as they conveniently termed the family. David and Richard played tennis and golf and sailed, and went for a dip in the sea two or three times a day; and Ralph grew old enough to be of some use and companionship. Usually the Bradleys’ big house was filled with Richard’s friends; the Bradleys were hospitable people. Only Marion was cool to David; and it wounded him, because he could not help admiring her. She spoke French and read Italian and commanded at least a jargon about pictures and sculptures and had a solid grounding in music.
“No wonder,” thought David ruefully on many an occasion when ignorance kept him dumb, “no wonder that she despises me!”
He acknowledged to himself that it did seem as if school and college had done little for him, so far as qualifying him to make a brilliant appearance in society was concerned. Biology was not a parlor subject; chemistry made the hands unattractive; physics was a thing in which no girl was ever interested. Now Lester Wallace—there was a fellow who could prattle like a man of parts! He knew how to talk to such a girl as Marion.
Nevertheless Lester was frank in commenting upon her to David. “She’s a nice girl, but awfully high-brow and intense. It’s a great strain for one who has just what you might call a quick intelligence.”
David laughed. “Think what it would be if you had a slow one—like mine,” he said.
After all, David’s chief interests were not social or athletic even in vacation time; every day for six weeks each summer he went to the school of marine biology at Woods Hole, and the talks that he and Mr. Dean had over algæ and jellyfish and sponges and crustaceans were more interesting to him than the porch conversations of his friends, in which he was mainly a listener. Mr. Dean had been a collector of shells and an amateur student of biology and stimulated him in his research.
“You’ll find that these studies that you’re following now will help you when you get into the medical school,” said Mr. Dean. “It isn’t only the scientific knowledge you’re acquiring that will be valuable to you, it’s the accustoming yourself to scientific methods.”