If a man—almost any unattached male will do—wishes to feel the joys of being sought after and an object of general female attention, let him hasten away to a summer hotel, especially in one of the less fashionable resorts. At the fashionable ones there are always a few gilded youth about, who own motor boats and look divine in flannels. Their glory would be apt to make his seem like a star in the presence of the sun.
But at the others, those quiet family-hotels, to which people go ostensibly because the air is so much better, and they dislike the noise and fashion of the other places, but really because the board is five times cheaper—at these seminaries of bored spinsters a rash bachelor who intrudes can easily persuade himself that he is a combination of Richard the Lion-Heart and Don Juan.
What gay and girlish groups will be formed about him! How they will laugh at his jokes and listen with awe to his opinions! With what warmth they will admire his atrocious ties and homicidal socks—the colors are so striking and virile you know. They may even sit still while he sings.
The only objection is that popularity of this sort is apt to send a man back to the office a mental and physical wreck. Even a year of loafing on the boss's time hardly qualifies a man to paddle canoes, play tennis, walk miles, go for hay-cart drives, eat canned goods, and dance the foxtrot till one every morning, and then retire to fight for his life with a dozen big husky mosquitoes that have been sitting on the foot of his bed waiting for him in bloodthirsty fury for hours.
Talking of mosquitoes, have you ever seen any mosquitoes or flies to equal for size and ferocity those that flourish at any summer hotel or boarding-house? And the poorer the place the more various and highly developed are the entomological specimens.
There are mosquito-nets on the windows, of course, but they seem merely to annoy those birds of prey, and exacerbate their naturally hasty temper. After being obliged to bite his way through two or three folds of pink or blue gauze, no wonder a mosquito sits on your pillow and shrieks insanely in your ear what he is going to do to you. He then proceeds to do it, worse luck!
As for the flies, deserting in the most heartless manner the cows and horses they have lived with all winter, they rush with a glad shout into the dining-room, and standing with their hind feet in your bacon-and-eggs, reach over and lap up your coffee, or whatever it is people serve under that alias. Very chummy those flies, much more democratic than flies in town. The simple life of the country probably accounts for that—also for the way they wade into the butter like a hired man.
But if you really want to know what flies and mosquitoes—not to speak of ants and beetles and caterpillars—can really do, you ought to go "roughing it." As if the ordinary summer boarding-house wasn't rough enough for anything but the most exotic taste! "Roughing it" is a disease to which Canadian youth between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five is peculiarly liable.
We succumbed once. We went with a canoe and a tent and some beans and a couple of fellows who said they were old woodsmen and knew how to cook. Some day we may be able to bring ourself to write up that trip in detail. But it is only ten years ago, and the memory still rankles too bitterly.
After two weeks of carrying loads over portages, washing dishes, eating the bread and pancakes those two murderers baked, and sitting up nights to stab the bugs that crept upon us in the dark, we had almost to be sent to a sanitarium to recuperate. But good nursing and cod-liver oil brought us around again in a month or so. Roughing it?—yes, only "rough" seems a mild word to apply to it.