"Been taken on to travel with young Ansley. We stay here for three weeks, and then go out west."
"Loot pretty good?"
"Oh, just about the same, and, of course, I get my expenses."
"Pretty soft, what?" came from an Englishman.
"Yes, but then it's only for the summer."
These duties done, he felt free to stroll off till he found a convenient rock on which to sit by the lakeside. Lighting a cigarette, he was glad of a half hour to himself in which to enjoy the scene. It was a reposeful scene, because all that was human and sporting in it was lost in the living spirit of the background.
It was what he had always felt in this particular landscape, and had never been able to define till now—its quality of life. It was life of another order from physical life, and on another plane. You might have said that it reached you out of some phase of creation different from that of Earth. These hills were living hills; this lake was a living lake. Through them, as in the serene sky, a Presence shone and smiled on you. He had often noticed, during the summer at the inn-club, that you could sit idle and silent with that Presence, and not be bored. You looked and looked; you thought and thought; you were bathed about in tranquillity. People might be running around, and calling or shouting, as they were doing now in the tennis courts on a ledge of the hillside above him, not five hundred yards away, but they disturbed you no more than the birds or the butterflies. The Presence was too immense, too positive, to allow little things to trouble it. Rather, it took them and absorbed them, as if the Supreme Activity, which for millions of years before there was a man had been working to transform this spot into a cup of overflowing loveliness, could use anything that came Its way.
So he sat and smoked and thought and felt soothed. It was early enough in the summer for the birds to be singing from all the wooded terraces and the fringe of lakeside trees. Calls from the tennis courts, cries from young people climbing on the raft in the lake or diving from the spring-board, came to him softened and sweet. It was living peace, invigorating, restful.