"Aren't you fearfully keen for your tea?"
I really don't care in the least for tea; in fact, I rather dislike it. But she seemed to take it so for granted that I should be in a sort of tea-guzzling frenzy by half-past five o'clock that I hated to disappoint her, and was going to say, "Oh, yes—fearfully," when it flashed through me that I could make my reply more elaborate and interesting than this, and thought it would be rather effective to murmur, "One gets so out of the habit in Cambridge." Then (all this took only about a second) it occurred to me that I 'd never in my whole life drunk a cup of tea in the afternoon with the exception of the time that Berrisford had some people out to his rooms. So I merely said—which was perfectly true: "I don't like tea; but I like those thin, round cakes that are brown at the edges and yellow in the middle." This made her laugh, and I was glad I had n't said the other thing, because she 's very pretty when she laughs.
One corner of the piazza is enclosed in glass, and we had tea out there where we could watch the sunset and the pink lights on the water as it rolled up almost to the lawn in the front yard. The two younger brothers came in—one of them has a tutor and the other goes to St. Timothy's—and while we were waiting for the tea things to be brought, Mr. and Mrs. Sherwin sauntered across the grass. I forget whether they had been gathering orchids in the conservatory or merely feeding the peacocks, but they were both exceedingly gracious and glad to see me. Yet their very way of taking me so for granted (just as Miss Sherwin had about the tea) made me uncomfortable at first. They could n't, of course, have asked me to explain myself—to tell them what right I had to consume cakes in their crystal palace and enjoy their sunset; but the mere fact that they did n't seem to expect me to justify myself in any way made me feel like an impostor.
The man who brought in the tea things had a good deal to do with this. I 'm quite sure that he disapproved of me from the first. He was older than the two who met us at the door, and I think he had probably long since ceased to worry on his own account; but he worried a lot over me. Later—at dinner—he just gave up all his other duties and stood behind my chair, mentally calculating the chances of my coming out even or behind the game in the matter of knives and forks. Whenever I used too many or too few (which I did constantly) he would glide away and remedy the defect, or craftily remove the damning evidence of my inattention. In writing to mamma about my visit I ended my letter by saying: "I had a delightful time—but it would take me years to get used to their butler." To which mamma replied: "I'm glad you enjoyed yourself, dear; they must live charmingly. But I simply can't see why they should n't have good butter. It's so easy to get it now almost anywhere. Perhaps they don't eat it themselves and don't realize that they are being imposed upon." (This will be one of the greatest triumphs of papa's declining years, as he is always blowing me up about my handwriting.) Whenever Dempsey (the other servants call him "Mr. Dempsey") came into the glass place I waited in a sort of trembling eagerness, half expecting him to announce "Lord and Lady Belgrave and Miss Muriel Fitz Desmond," but the only person who dropped in was an old man named Snagg, and although Dempsey made as much out of his arrival as any one possibly could—you can't, after all, do miracles with a name like Snagg. However, I was grateful to Mr. Snagg for coming, as it brought me back to earth again.
To tell the truth, before the evening was finished I began to get over the unreal sensation I had at first, and saw very plainly that whether or not I felt at home depended entirely on me. Duggie and his family—poor things—did n't have any idea that their Dempsey paralyzed me with fright, or that (just as Berri had predicted) by the time dinner was ready I was shaky in the knees with hunger. They assumed that a friend of Duggie's naturally would feel at home and know beforehand what was going to happen. This dawned on me when I realized that Duggie was exactly as he always is, and that the others were probably exactly as they always were, and I couldn't help appreciating after a time that if they took me so calmly, it was rather unreasonable of me not to feel the same way about them. No one made any effort to entertain me, which is very nice—after you get used to it. Mrs. Sherwin played solitaire after dinner, while Duggie and his sister (she was embroidering something) and I sat around a fire that Miss Sherwin said was built of driftwood from an old whaler, and Duggie declared was manufactured with chemicals by a shrewd person in Maine. I don't know who was right, but with the sea murmuring just outside the windows and coming down every now and then with a great thud on the little beach at the end of the lawn, I preferred to believe in the old whaler theory. Mr. Sherwin would appear every few minutes to read us something he had come across in a volume of literary reminiscences which reminded him of something entirely different that had happened to Thoreau or Emerson or Hawthorne or Margaret Fuller—all of whom he had, as a young man, known very well, indeed. He was delightful.
The next day was Sunday, and as no one awoke me, I found when I got downstairs that it was after ten o'clock and that everybody, with the exception of Duggie, had gone to church. Duggie had been up for hours taking a long walk with the dogs. He came into the glass place on the piazza, where I had breakfast, and read aloud about the game of the day before. Out-of-doors it was almost as warm as in summer, so we took some books and strolled along a cliff to a sheltered place on the rocks, and sat down in the sun. I did n't feel much like reading, although when you 're sitting out-of-doors in the sun I think it's rather pleasanter, somehow, to have a book on your lap. Duggie had a shabby little volume that he read for a minute or two at a time; then he would stop for five or ten and look at the sea swirling around a rock away below us. After a while I became curious to know what the book was, and the next time he closed it over his finger I reached out and took it. The name of it was M. Aurelius Antoninus, and it seemed to be a series of short, disconnected paragraphs with a great many footnotes. A good many of the paragraphs were marked. The only one I can remember went something like this,—
"Don't act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest—while it is in thy power, be good."
"I suppose you 're studying this for some course," I remarked after I had read the extract aloud. "It's so solemn I didn't think you could be reading it for fun," I added.
"I don't suppose I am reading it for fun exactly," Duggie laughed. "It isn't very funny to realize the force of that paragraph when there are so many things you hope to do."
"Well, of course I know I 'm not going to live ten thousand years, but it's so lovely down here that I don't feel a bit as if I were n't," I said, lying back in the sun and closing my eyes.