"No, we haven't," said Marie. "Judge Black and General Argyle are looking for you to play tenpins."
Ralph smiled back at her. "Let them look! It will do the old codgers good. Do you like this place?"
"Yes, very much. Don't you?"
"Oh, I like it so-so!" said Ralph. "It's a good enough lotus land, but there's a lack somehow of wild, exciting adventure. I've been trying to read on the hotel porch. What do you think they're talking about over there? Fringed doilies!"
"What do you like to do and to talk about?"
"Live things." He laughed, tossed an apple into the air and caught it again. "I want first to make fifty millions, and then I want to spend fifty millions!"
"What an admirable American you are!"
"Am I not? And I vary it with just wanting to be a cowboy with a six-shooter on a Western plain—" He tossed the apple into the air again and, watching it, missed the glimpse of Hagar which the other two received. She appeared around the corner of a neighbouring cottage, her face directed toward the traveller's-joy porch, saw Coltsworth, wheeled and withdrew. He caught the apple, and after gazing meditatively for a moment in the direction of the tenpin-alley, sighed, and said that he supposed after all he might as well go help the General demolish the Army of the Potomac. "That's what he calls the pins when they're set up. He takes the biggest bowl and sends it thundering. I believe he thinks for the moment it is a ball from one of his old twenty-pounders. He sees fire and smells smoke. Sometimes he demolishes the Army of the Potomac and sometimes he doesn't; but he never gets discouraged. The next cannon ball will surely do the work!"
When he was gone, and had been gone twenty minutes or more, Hagar reappeared. She came swiftly across the grass, mounted the porch steps, and stood, with a little deprecating shake of her head for the offered chair, by Elizabeth's work-table. "I am not going to stay, thank you! Miss Eden, somebody told me last night that you had written and published books—"