"I heard scald-crow laughter behind me in the shawls."
III
THE FRIEND OF HER YOUTH
It has come to this with me, I am not the country-house visitor that I once was. It is a sign of age, I suppose, and of growing unamiability; so, at any rate, my wife tells me. For my part, I think it indicates a power of discriminating between the things that are good enough, and the infinitely more numerous things that are the reverse.
"Do you mean to say this isn't good enough?" said Philippa, putting down the novel that, at 11 A.M., she was shamelessly reading, and indicating our surroundings with a swing of her open parasol.
It was a perfect morning in August. She and I were seated in incredible leisure, in comfortable basket chairs, on a space of sward that sank in pleasant curves to the verge of the summer sea. We looked across three miles of burnished water to the Castle Manus hills, that showed mistily through grey veils of heat; in the middle distance a 40-ton cutter yacht drowsed at anchor; at the end of the sward a strand, theatrical in the perfection of its pale sand and dark rocks, laid itself out to attract the bather.
"I think it is very good," I replied, "but it won't last. At any minute old Derryclare will come and compel me to go out trawling, or mending nets, or cutting up bait, or mucking out the dinghey——"
"You may be thankful if he lets you off with that!" said Philippa, flitting from her first position and taking up one in advance of mine.
Following the direction of her eyes, I perceived, as it were at the back of the stage, two mysterious, shrouded figures pursuing a swift course towards the house through a shrubbery of immense hydrangea bushes. Their heads resembled monster black door-handles, round their shoulders hung flounces of black muslin; in gauntleted hands they bore trays loaded with "sections" of honey; even at a distance of fifty yards we could see their attendant cortège of indignant bees.