They had a long-reaching, rough-cast house, in a semi-Spanish style, high above the water. They had ten acres of lawn and thicket. They had their own cow. And there was little Althea—a nice enough child—for a playmate.
"Let me get Albert away from all this smoke and grime," his mother pleaded—or argued—or demanded, dramatically. "Let me give him the pure country air. Let me give him the right things to eat and drink. Let me look after his poor little clothes,—if" (with another half-sob) "he is ever to wear them again. Let me give him a real mother's real care. You would like that better, wouldn't you, dear?"
"Yes," said Albert faintly.
It is quite possible, of course, that his school really had scanted the motherly touch.
"You see how it goes!" Raymond finally said to me, one evening, in the shadow of the orchestrion. "And what she will dress him in this time...!"
The whole situation wore on him horribly. There was a light play over his cheeks and jaws: I almost heard his teeth grit.
A few days later Albert was transferred to his mother's place in the country. Raymond consoled himself as best he might with the thought that this sojourn was, after all, but preliminary, as Gertrude had herself implied, to the coming month on the Maine coast or at Mackinac. A change of air, a greater change of air, a change to an air immensely and unmistakably and immediately tonic and upbuilding—that, as his mother stated, with emphasis, was what Albert required.
So Albert, by way of introduction to his real summer, came to be domiciled under the splendid new roof of Johnny McComas—a roof, to Raymond's exacerbated sense, gleaming but heavy. Its tiles—he had not seen them, but he readily visualized them—bore him down. He was not obliged, as yet, to meet McComas himself. That came later.