Mr. Finchsifter has compared my Lake to a gleaming sapphire reposing on a corsage of emerald green plush.
I have never seen Mr. Finchsifter’s wife—I do not even know that Finchsifter is married, but since the emerald plush bosom of his poetic fancy, stands for miles and miles of heaving Pines and fluttering Laurels and Finchsifter stands barely four feet six in his stockings, by all the laws of natural selection the human embodiment of his Brobdingnagian simile, must be either Mrs. Finchsifter or some not impossible Eve of a Finchsifter dream Paradise. A colossal counterpart (I picture her), of the waxen Demi-Goddess in the Finchsifter show window displaying with revolving impartiality on a faultless neck and bosom the glittering treasures of India, Africa, Peru, Mexico and Maiden Lane.
To be strictly truthful, I do not know that Mr. Finchsifter’s show window can boast such a waxen deity as I have described; indeed for all I know he possesses neither a show window nor the merchandise to advertise in such a window, but I have as the saying is, a “hunch” that Mr. Finchsifter’s imagery as applied to my Lake is based on something more than a mere academic interest in the adornment, textile or lapidarious of the human form.
And my Lake—in the first place it is not my Lake (but of that later), neither does it resemble a sapphire any more than the Pines and Laurels on its bank (save that when agitated they heave or flutter) resemble a green plush corsage.
If I were asked for an image, I should compare my Lake to an India-rubber band rather than to a sapphire. In form an elongated ellipse, it possesses an elasticity of circumference that is little short of miraculous.
The boastful pedestrian, glowing from his early morning trot around its shore will tell you it is a good ten miles.
The persistent swain, scheming to lure his Heart’s Desire, high heeled and reluctant, to the amorous shades of “Lover’s Landing,” tells her, upon his honor, that it is not more than a mile all the way round. To be precise, the distance round my Lake is something between a stroll and a “constitutional”—or to put it relatively about what the circumambulation of an ocean liner’s deck would be to an athletic inch worm.
As I said before, my Lake is not my Lake. It is nobody’s Lake. Not a human habitation profanes its bosky shores. The only beings that make even a pretense of ownership are five starch-white swans that patrol it from morning till night, turning fitfully this way and that and probing its depths and shallows with their yellow bills as if seeking for the missing Deed of title. On certain days when the diamond Lake is still, and the Pine and Laurel corsage is untroubled by a tremor, the starch-white company is doubled by five ghostly “understudies” who reflect their whiteness curve for curve and feather for feather with a fidelity of inversion that may find its match only in the art of a Shaw or a Chesterton.
It was on such a day as this that I met Mr. Finchsifter. I had completed the circuit of the Lake and leaving the wooded path that skirts its shore ascended through the woods to the level ground above, where on the further side of a well kept automobile road rises the lofty iron grille that engirdles for miles the country seat of Barabbas Wolfe, the Sausage King, typifying at once, by the safe deposit-like thickness of its bars and the view-inviting openness of its scrollwork, the innate love of show, tempered by newly acquired exclusiveness of a lord not to the manor born.
Gazing, in beady eyed appraisal at the neat but somewhat constricted Italian garden to which the railing at this point invited the eye—stood Finchsifter.