Their footsteps made no sound on the mossy path, and they came suddenly upon a deer and his doe drinking at a pool. But the antlered head was flung back instantly, the magnificent buck wheeled on his hind legs, gave a leap and went crashing through the forest snorting his protesting fury. The doe scampered after, her white-lined tail standing up perfectly straight.
They sat down on a log, dried and warmed by the sun in this open space, and talked for two hours. There was no need for careful avoidance of dangerous subjects. Clavering had come to these woods nearly every year since he had made the north his home, and she had forgotten nothing of her woodland lore. When one is "in the woods," as the great Adirondacks are familiarly called, one rarely talks of anything but their manifold offerings. It is easy enough to forget the world. They both had had their long tramps, their rough campings-out, more or less exciting adventures. When a loud bell, hung in a frame outside the camp, summoned them to dinner, they walked out briskly. Once, as the trail widened, he touched her fingers tentatively. She let her own curl for a moment, then gave him a provocative glance over her shoulder and hurried on.
XLVIII
Clavering, when making up his list with Mr. Dinwiddie (by courtesy), had, with the exception of Todd, who was always the life of any party, Gora, whom he always liked to have at hand, and Eva Darling, who was a favorite of "The Ambassador to the Court of the Sophisticates," as Todd had long since dubbed him, chosen his guests at random, taking whom he could get, careful merely to ask those who, so far as he knew, were on speaking terms.
But he hardly could have gathered together a more congenial and lively party, nor one more delighted to leave New York for the woods. Henry Minor, editor of one of the intellectual and faintly radical magazines, whose style was so involved in his efforts to be both "different" and achieve an unremitting glitter, that he had recently received a petition to issue a glossary, was as amiable as a puppy in the society of his friends and when in the woods talked in words of one syllable and discovered a mighty appetite. His wife, who had demonstrated her originality by calling herself Mrs. Minor, was what is known as a spiffing cook and a top-notch dresser. She had, in fact, the most charming assortment of sports clothes in the camp. Eva Darling, who danced for pastime and illustrated for what little bread she was permitted to eat at home, was as lively as a grasshopper and scarcely less devastating. Babette Gold wore her black hair in smooth bands on either side of the perfect oval of her face, and had the sad and yearning gaze of the unforgiven Magdalen, and she had written two novels dealing with the domesticities of the lower middle class, treating with a clinical wealth of detail the irritable monotonies of the nuptial couch and the artless intimacies of the nursery. She smoked incessantly, could walk ten miles at a stretch, and was as passionless as a clam. Gerald Scores, who wore a short pointed beard and looked the complete artist, was one of the chief hopes of the intellectual drama cunningly commercialized; and as capable as Clavering of shutting up his genius in a water-tight compartment, and enjoying himself in the woods. He was mildly flirtatious, but looked upon emotional intensity in the personal life of the artist as a criminal waste of force. Halifax Bolton, who claimed to be the discoverer of the Younger Generation (in fiction) and was just twenty-eight himself, was a critic of formidable severity and the author of at least five claques. The intense concentration of writing routed his sense of humor, but he had as many droll stories in his repertoire as Todd. His wife, the famous "Alberta Jones," fierce Lucy Stoner, was the editor, at a phenomenal salary, of one of the "Woman's Magazines," and wrote short stories of impeccable style and indifferent content for the Century and the Dial.
They were all intimate friends and argued incessantly and amiably. And they were all devoted to Mr. Dinwiddie, whom they addressed as Excellence, without accent.
