“I didn’t realize we were getting here,” said Edna. “We’ve always come up the stream.”
“But what have you got against it?” asked the young man, horribly chagrined. “It’s a beautiful spot, and it’s not snakey.”
“It is!” said Andrée. “We’ve seen snakes swimming in your beautiful natural swimming pool.”
“They weren’t poisonous snakes, then,” he assured her. “And they’ll keep out of your way.”
“I won’t give them the trouble,” said Andrée.
“We’ll look after you, Miss Edna and I,” said Mr. MacGregor. He always made a point of pretending that he and Edna were the firmest of allies, perhaps because she was the only member of the family he didn’t at all fear.
“I believe I’ll risk it!” said Edna. “It looks so lovely and cool and I’m so terribly hot.”
The fat youth and the young man had gone away again, and Mr. MacGregor and the host withdrew, to return very promptly in their bathing suits. Claudine was filled with quiet amusement at them; each was so evidently satisfied with his superiority over the other. Mr. MacGregor had an air of saying “I don’t believe you realized what a fine, big man I am! This poor chap’s tights are too short for me, and my chest almost bursts his poor little jersey. I may be an artist, but what a manly one!” And young Stephens, straighter than ever, couldn’t keep a grin from his freckled face; he was itching with a desire to show off. He was, moreover, very proud of the arrangements he had provided for the ladies; a little tent to serve as their dressing-room, with a mirror fastened to one of its sides.
It was characteristic that Andrée should be the most daring and reckless of them all. Claudine could not swim; she waded waist deep into the pool and stood there throwing water over her shoulders, like a little statue in a fountain, Edna thought, full of a precise and formal grace, not one burnished hair out of place. Mr. MacGregor swam powerfully all about the pool once or twice, to show his strength, and Edna followed him, and though she didn’t go nearly so fast, she wasn’t nearly so tired. He felt a little pang of envy for her youth that tinged his admiration for her with an almost unkindly feeling. Seen in a bathing suit, she was more robust than one would have imagined; she was small, like her mother, but it was not at all a fairylike smallness. She had a beautiful, a perfect figure, well-developed, supple, and sturdy; her skin was as white as a Dryad’s in that tree-shadowed place, and her blond hair was like sunshine, although her dimpled face had no sort of resemblance to any wild wood creature. Never would she pine or die for love! She was a young woman, not a sprite, and she had all of woman’s marvelous resources against suffering. Compared with her, Andrée was an immature and farouche school-girl.
And yet it was she they all looked at. She was a fleet swimmer, but with little endurance. She had a well-known trick of swimming out too far and becoming panic-stricken and needing help to get back to the shore. She had a positive talent for alarming and distressing the others, for being perpetually the centre of attention. It was not that she consciously tried to “show off,” like Stephens; what she did, she did to satisfy some requirement of her own nature. She insisted upon swimming too near the waterfall; she would dive, heedless of remonstrance. She was wayward, taciturn, defiant. She was the only one of the women to get her hair wet, the only one who emerged dank, shivering and dishevelled. And when they sat down on the pebbly shore for supper, she alone was untidy, she alone out of spirits. Her damp hair hung about her shoulders, her lips were bluish; she had only the curtest answers, and was obviously disinclined to speak at all.