As he was walking back with her to Glendhu one day, he noticed that she was rather abstracted.
‘I wonder what you are thinking of, Miss Mowbray,’ he said. ‘You have not answered me once since we left the pier.’
‘Haven’t I? I’m sure I beg your pardon.’
‘See that patch of sunlight on the hill across the loch!’ cried Alec enthusiastically. ‘See how it brings out the rich yellow colour of the moss, while all the rest of the hill is in shadow.’
‘You ought to have been a painter,’ said his companion.
‘Don’t you think Arrochar is a perfectly lovely place?’ returned Alec.
‘Yes; very pretty. But it is very dull.’
‘Dull?’
‘Yes; there is no life—no gaiety. It is said that the English take their pleasures sadly; but they are gaiety itself compared with you Scotch. You shut yourselves up in your own houses and don’t mix with your neighbours at all. At least you have no amusements in which anyone can share. The boating, tennis, bathing, everything is done en famille. There is no fun, no mixing with the rest of the world. In an English watering-place people stay at hotels, or in lodgings; and if they tire of one place they can go to another. Then they have parties of all kinds, and dances at the hotels. Here everyone takes a house for two months, and moves down with servants, plate, linen, groceries, perhaps even the family piano. I only wonder they don’t bring the bedsteads. Having got to their houses, they stay there, and perhaps never see a strange face till it is time to go back to town. It’s a frightfully narrowing system, not to speak of the dulness of it.’
‘I never thought of it before,’ said Alec. ‘I don’t care to know more people myself; I am never at my ease with people till I know them pretty well. But I am sorry if you find it dull.’