“And that will be to do what you shall please to have me do.”
“Ah, that's nice. Then I accept your services at once. I am quite alone here; haven't any acquaintances in the hotel. I want to go bathing and I'm rather timid about going alone, although I'd made up my mind to do so and was just going up after my bathing suit.”
“Then I am to have the happiness of escorting you into the surf.”
They went bathing together not far from where he had found the bracelet. He discovered that she could swim as well as he; also that in her dark blue bathing costume, with sailor collar and narrow white braid, she was a most shapely person.
She laughed frequently while they were breasting the breakers; and afterwards, as in their street attire they were returning on the boardwalk, she chatted brightly with him, revealing a certain cleverness in off-hand persiflage.
He took her into the tent behind the observation wheel to see the Egyptian exhibition, and she was good enough to laugh at his jokes about the mummies, although the mummies did not seem to interest her. Further down the boardwalk they stopped at the Japanese exhibition, and on the way out he caught himself saying that if it were possible, he would take great pleasure in hauling her in a jinrikisha.
“I'll remember that promise and make you push me in a wheel-chair,” she answered.
When they were back at the hotel, she turned suddenly and said:
“By the way, what's your name? Mine's Clara Hunt.”
He told her, and while she went up the elevator with her bathing suit, he arranged with the head waiter to have himself seated at her table.