“No. I sent Mr. Forbes.”
“You ought to go. It saves buying a map. Yes, I like the place immensely. You mustn't judge of the variety here by the table at Rodick's. I don't suppose there's a place on the coast that compares with it in interest; I mean variety of effects and natural beauty. If the writers wouldn't exaggerate so, talk about 'the sublimity of the mountains challenging the eternal grandeur of the sea'!”
“Don't use such strong language there on the back seat,” cried Miss Lamont. “This is a pleasure party. Mr. Van Dusen wants to know why Maud S. is like a salamander?”
“He is not to be gratified, Marion. If it is conundrums, I shall get out and walk.”
Before the conundrum was guessed, the volatile Van Dusen broke out into, “Here's a how d'e do!” One of the Ashley girls in the next wagon caught up the word with, “Here's a state of things!” and the two buckboards went rattling down the hill to Eagle Lake in a “Mikado” chorus.
“The Mikado troupe seems to have got over here in advance of Sullivan,” said Mr. King to Irene. “I happened to see the first representation.”
“Oh, half these people were in London last spring. They give you the impression that they just run over to the States occasionally. Mr. Van Dusen says he keeps his apartments in whatever street it is off Piccadilly, it's so much more convenient.”
On the steamer crossing the lake, King hoped for an opportunity to make an explanation to Irene. But when the opportunity came he found it very difficult to tell what it was he wanted to explain, and so blundered on in commonplaces.
“You like Bar Harbor so well,” he said, “that I suppose your father will be buying a cottage here?”
“Hardly. Mr. Meigs” (King thought there was too much Meigs in the conversation) “said that he had once thought of doing so, but he likes the place too well for that. He prefers to come here voluntarily. The trouble about owning a cottage at a watering-place is that it makes a duty of a pleasure. You can always rent, father says. He has noticed that usually when a person gets comfortably established in a summer cottage he wants to rent it.”