Instead of the Thorn: A Novel

by Clara Louise Burnham

The house was set back some two hundred feet from the sea and a few Balm-of-Gilead trees relieved the monotony of the wind-swept landscape.

Madge Lindsay had found places for a couple of hammocks, which Fred Whitcomb observed with satisfaction on his arrival with his charge.

"You're perfectly welcome to them," Miss Lindsay assured him. "Did you ever play the rôle of a head of cabbage for six weeks?"

"Is it anything like a blockhead?" inquired Whitcomb. "I've played that all my life."

"Yes, they're ever so much the same," drawled Madge. Perhaps she had affected a drawl to offset her devoted mother's snappy, nervous manner. At any rate, it was second nature now. "You're not allowed to have an idea when you're assigned the rôle of cabbage head; so it amounts to the same thing as your limitation."

"Thanks awfully," returned Whitcomb. "It's worth everything to discover sympathy." He was establishing King in a steamer chair on the piazza while they were talking: a precarious piazza it was, with a list to leeward.

Mrs. Lindsay looked on solicitously and held ready a steamer rug. "These slanting boards used to make me seasick at first," she said, "but after a while you don't mind anything here, the air is so divine and there's so much of it." She extinguished King's evident shiver with her rug.

"Thank you, Mrs. Lindsay," he said. "Do you guarantee that in a short time I shall act and feel less like a shaky old woman? Or, perhaps, I'm more like a baby. Whitcomb's brought everything along but a nursing-bottle, and his beefiness makes me feel like a rattling skeleton."

"Oh, just be a cabbage, Mr. King," advised Madge, "and you'll come out all right. You know how much stress is laid on thinking these days. Don't think a shaky old woman, and don't think a baby, but think a cabbage. It's the most restful thing in the world; and there's nothing and nobody here to inspire a thought."

"You have neighbors," said King, "according to Whitcomb. A cousin of mine, Mrs. Porter, is staying here with Miss Barry. Mrs. Porter is the sort to inspire even a cabbage."