Sibthorp and I and no fish arrived home simultaneously with my guests.
The meeting of Billy and Cherry was most affecting. They acted like school children over each other. It struck me at the time how much more a woman will palaver over a man if she does not care for him in any other than a Platonic way than she will when her affections are engaged.
It is also queer how some men express themselves more fully in their letters than they do in their actions.
Billy was much quieter than Tom, and Jack was almost reserved.
But the same air that has a lazing effect on writers braces up artists to do good work. Tom had painted two landscapes since his arrival and Billy and Jack went out after supper and each took a shy at the same sunset.
It was curious to see how different were the colors each used.
And the sun had used another palette altogether. And yet all three sunsets were beautiful and I dare say that one was as true as the other, all of them being illusions.
CHAPTER XXXI
THE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY.
IT may not possess any interest to the reader, but I feel that we have been together so long (if he has not skipped) that he will be interested to know that early in September an editor in New York wrote me, saying that he would take a long story of mine at such a figure that—well, our summer outing was more than paid for and on receipt of the check I stopped keeping a hotel and insisted on my “guests” becoming guests—a distinction with a wide difference.