Rod went about from spot to spot, observing the lilacs, the rhododendrons, the bloom-hidden rockeries, all the fragrant beauty of the grounds and the sanctuary of the massed woods running back of Big Dent. He brought up at last on the float. He looked into a commodious boat-house. His dugout, the brilliant paint a trifle faded, sat on blocks, wide checks in the wood from long drouth. He shoved it into the water, let it fill to soak and swell tight. Then he took a rowboat and pushed out of the bay. A short run of tide made a slow current in the channel. He was well pleased to feel and smell salt water again, to have the sharp odor of kelp in his nostrils, to sniff the aromatic pungence wafted by faint airs out of the banked forest across the cool sea.
He had no particular purpose, no explicit destination. Perhaps for that reason, or lack of it, he landed an hour or so later at Oliver Thorn's float.
Your natural patrician is alone able to practice democracy without condescension, to meet his fellows on any common ground available. It made no difference to Rod Norquay that Oliver Thorn and his family were completely outside the Norquay orbit socially, financially, perhaps even intellectually,—although the last count was highly debatable. It merely amused Rod to recall that Norquay senior had once frowned on Thorn as a "dreamy-eyed incompetent." Rod knew these people, no matter how or why. He knew them. He liked them. That was sufficient.
And there was Mary besides, a stimulus to his adolescent curiosity. He quite frankly wanted to see her again. She had been almost the only real playmate he could associate with the later and most important part of his youth. He had vivid and pleasant memories of her, which had not grown less by two years during which she might have died or married or gone to a far country, for all he knew. There had been one or two stiff little letters, then silence. Rod easily accounted for that. Too many things pressing in on them both. Too acute a self-consciousness. Rod never thought of the manner of their parting without a slight wonder at that queer surge of feeling. He supposed it was the same with Mary Thorn,—a something that made for restraint between them, that could not be overcome by letters. He knew girls without number. He danced with them, rode with them, drove them about in motor cars. Two years of Montreal and three months in Europe had tremendously expanded his experience of femininity. And Mary stood out against this background of girls like an oil portrait among a group of half-tone prints.
Rod didn't attempt to account for this. He hadn't cast a sentimental halo about her. His pulse did not quicken when he thought of her. He simply remembered her vividly as a girl he knew and liked better than all the rest. The nearest he came to an analysis of the "why" was to wonder if it were not because he remembered Mary in her look and words, in her person and manner, as supremely natural. He had an ingrained dislike for the artificial. He had been born with that predisposition. So had Phil. He liked to think that was a Norquay characteristic. And the generation of girls and young women Rod knew seemed like exotic flowers,—with their lipsticks and powder, their exaggeration of speech, their startling frankness. They were easy to admire. Upon occasion their provocative sex might trumpet a challenge. But in the main rouge and talcum, pert slang, the assurance of complete sophistication amused Rod without greatly interesting him.
He took it for granted Mary would be at home. But the Thorn world had moved as well as his own. He found Oliver Thorn sitting on the porch looking over a newspaper. They shook hands. Mrs. Thorn came out to greet him. And freshly she impressed Rod with a sense of serenity, of kindliness, of a motherly quality he could not remember in his own life.
"Where's Mary?" he asked.
"Still in town. She'll be home soon, though, I hope. She cut a year in high school and entered the U.B.C. last summer," Mrs. Thorn told him. "She's quite grown up, Rod. I don't believe you'd know her. She's changed, like you."
"But I don't think I've changed much," Rod demurred.
"Of course you wouldn't see it yourself, but I can," Mrs. Thorn smiled.