And he did believe that when she actually saw this life in operation, she would admire it. Only, it was important that his Aunt Kate should not be too obviously an example.
There was nothing he could do about it now, though. He had written to his Aunt Kate, and she had come; he had arranged to open the house at Green Lake, and to spend a three weeks’ vacation there, and the house was open, and he was in it; he had invited Mrs. Dexter and Mimi for a fortnight, and they were coming this afternoon. The experiment was about to begin. He could only hope.
But this afternoon he found it difficult to do any really effective hoping. An unaccountable depression had come over him; he stood upon the veranda of this house of his, smoking a pipe, and regarding the scene before him with something very like dismay in his eyes.
He had only seen the house once before, and it seemed to him that his outlook must have been biased then by his pleasure in having inherited a house. Certainly it had looked very different, that first time. It had been midsummer, then, and he remembered standing in this same window and looking out at the lake—a glimpse of glittering water seen through the trees.
It was late September, now, and the leaves were thinner, and he could see the lake very well. Lake? It was a pond—a stagnant and sinister little pond, covered[Pg 403] with scum, the source and the refuge of all these swarms and swarms of mosquitoes. And the house itself, which had seemed so dim and cool and restful on that summer day, was strangely altered now.
His late uncle’s furniture was good, and quite plain enough to suit any one, but it seemed to him that there wasn’t enough of it; the rooms had so bare and desolate a look. And it was damp. He had been here now for a week with his aunt, and she herself said that the dampness had “got into her bones.” He thought that was a good way of putting it; the dampness had got into his bones, too; he had never felt so cold in his life. He was positively shivering with it.
“That’s all nonsense!” he said to himself, angrily. “The mercury’s up to fifty-eight. I can’t be cold!”
He was, though—wretchedly, miserably cold. He sauntered down the hall and stood in the doorway of the kitchen, pretending that he wished to chat with his aunt, but really to be near the stove. It did him no good at all; he felt as cold as ever, and the aroma of the plain dinner—a lamb stew—which Mrs. Boles was cooking, filled him with unaccountable distaste. Such was his mood that Mrs. Boles herself had a chilling appearance; her gray hair seemed frosty; her white apron looked as if it would be icy to touch.
The cuckoo clock in the hall struck three. It was a cantankerous old clock, and when it struck three, it meant a quarter to four; time for him to be off. So off he went, out to the barn where he kept his car, in he climbed, and set off for the railway station.
And it was no use insisting that it was the jolting over bad roads which made him shake so, because the shaking kept on after he had alighted and was waiting on the platform. He was shivering violently; his teeth were chattering; his head ached; he felt horribly ill.