“If I could wear pink and dead white, and brilliant blues as you can I should resign red without a struggle. I have never seen anything so beautiful as you are with a pink rose in your hair and another at your throat.”
But I had had as much of this as I could stand and I asked her abruptly if she had visited many of the lakes.
“This is my first visit to the Adirondacks, I am ashamed to say. I was taken abroad every summer when I was a girl and I have gone almost every year since from force of habit and because I really have such a delicious time. It is one’s duty to see all the beauties of the old world, don’t you think so, Lady Helen?”
But I did not want to talk about Europe. “I hear that Spruce Lake is so beautiful,” I said. “Could not we—a party of us—walk over there some day? It is only seven miles, and Mr. Nugent says the trail is very good.”
“Seven miles! Dear Lady Helen. Twice seven are fourteen. Remember—we—alas!—are not English.”
“They might put us up for the night——”
“Oh, quite impossible. We do not know any of them. They are business people from Buffalo and Utica and all those provincial towns.”
“In trade, do you mean?”
“That is the way you would express it. It is the same class—people who keep stores or make things.”
“And they have the same tastes as yourself?” I asked, puzzled at this new American facer. “They are—sportsmen? They lead the same life up here as you do?”