XXV
MOLLY WINSTON TO MERCÉDES LANE
Wenham.
Mercédes Dear:
My first thought as I waked yesterday morning was Aunt Mary. I thought of her in my bath—a cold porcelain bath, rapidly filling up with hot water, and giving me rather the feeling of eating an ice with hot chocolate sauce. I thought of Aunt M. with breakfast and choked her down with my coffee. When we had left our happy home—the Boston hotel—the "chug chug" of our motor sang the song which the West Point cadets have made up for "church call."
"You've got to go, whether you want to or not!
You've got to go, so you'd better turn out!
Oh, h—ades!"
But after a while the road was so pretty that I succeeded in forgetting her now and then, as you might forget you were on the way to the dentist's when you passed splendid jewellery and hat shops.
We were also on the way to Marblehead and Salem; Aunt Mary wasn't till afterward.
Marblehead, with all its romance of ancient days, is only about sixteen miles from Boston as the automobile flies, but you pass a good many sweet things first. We went through Somerville, got lost there, and were guided in every direction but the right one by a plague of boys not much bigger than the "dimes" they didn't earn. Jack simply won't look at maps when in the car, or inquire; expects to find his way by instinct, and somehow generally does. (Are all men like that?) Crossed the Mystic River, and got on to the velvet surface of the Revere Beach Parkway. But Chelsea came before the Beach: charming old Chelsea, which probably, in its heart, thinks Boston its suburb, and prides itself on almost a century and a half of aristocratic peace since the old fighting days when Israel Putnam won his commission as Major-General there.
There couldn't be a greater contrast than between Chelsea and Revere Beach. It's a good thing that miles of parklike road—fought over once by Independents and British—lie between, or they could never stand each other, those two! Jack and I ought to have come to Revere Beach when we were little boy and girl, for, oh, the joy of it for children! What price the Dragon Gorge, the mountain railway more like the Alps than the Alps are like themselves, the theatres, the shops of every kind, the cottages which are nests for birds rather than commonplace, human habitations?