“Yes, really. I should think you would have heard us! We sang, ‘The Hounds of Maynell,’ from the landing to the lighthouse as hard as we could shout. We got the triple echo to saying all sorts of things. And then—” she paused, fitting her feet into white satin shoes, while Mrs. Budd agonized in suspense—“well, then, when we got out to ‘Tres Pinos’ there was such a surf we simply had to yell to make each other hear. And there,” concluded Julia, with a flourish of animation, quite as though she had reached the climax of her tale—“there my hat blew off.”
Mrs. Budd threw her hands in her lap with a gesture of resignation not lost upon her daughter.
“And Charlie was such a dear!” Julia smiled tenderly at the toe of her shoe, and Mrs. Budd gathered a faint hope.
“He piled off his horse and fell around in the fog for half an hour, and nearly drowned himself, till I said, ‘Oh, let it go,’ and he said, ‘All right, young madam,’ and off we went.”
Mrs. Budd’s expression of acute disappointment arrested her daughter’s attention. “Why, what did you expect he did, mama? Surely not something horrid?”
“Indeed, no. I’m quite certain, Julia, if Charlie Thair ever did anything at all, it could not be horrid.”
Julia stared a minute at this ambiguous paradox. Then she chuckled.
“I never liked him so much, mama. I got him all waked up. He didn’t have any time to be witty or tiresome. And on the way home what do you think he said?”
Mrs. Budd hung upon the revelation.
“He said,” Julia continued, with a touch of pride, “that I was awfully good sorts, if I was a beauty. Now wasn’t that nice of him, mama?”