In this crowded jungle of spotless stone Lions, tomblike seats and arches backed by California privet and immature cypresses there was an irreverent suggestion of the Villa D’Este done into American slang.
He turned hearing my step, “Where is it I have seen it—before?”
“In the movies perhaps”—I ventured.
“That’s it! Thank you very much!” he exclaimed. “I knew I had seen it somewhere!”
After ascertaining my name in reluctant payment for the unsolicited tender of his own he continued, “but the Lions show better in the ‘pictures’ don’t they? Why didn’t they get them with moss already.”
“With moss?” I queried.
“Sure!” said Finchsifter. “Didn’t you know such a stone Lion comes also with the moss, the same as the genuine old antique furniture comes with the real hand-made worm-holes!”
I remembered guiltily how on the occasion of my last visit to Lake towers when asked by Mrs. Barabbas Wolfe, what I thought of her marble Lions, I had exclaimed with truthful enthusiasm “Wonderful! But my dear lady how do you keep them so clean?”
We walked on together, and though avoiding as we did so the physical proximity of my Lake we could not exclude it wholly from our conversation.
It was a passing glitter of the water caught through the pines below us at a turn in the road that inspired the Diamond-plush simile from which try as I may, I shall never be able to dissociate the image of my Lake.