Indeed, the more I analyse it the more impossible it seems, for a man of my temperament at any rate, to be a summer guest. These people, and, I imagine, all other summer people, seem to be trying to live in a perpetual joke. Everything, all day, has to be taken in a mood of uproarious fun.
However, I can speak of it all now in quiet retrospect and without bitterness. It will soon be over now. Indeed, the reason why I have come down at this early hour to this quiet water is that things have reached a crisis. The situation has become extreme and I must end it.
It happened last night. Beverly-Jones took me aside while the others were dancing the fox-trot to the victrola on the piazza.
“We’re planning to have some rather good fun to-morrow night,” he said, “something that will be a good deal more in your line than a lot of it, I’m afraid, has been up here. In fact, my wife says that this will be the very thing for you.”
“Oh,” I said.
“We’re going to get all the people from the other houses over and the girls”—this term Beverly-Jones uses to mean his wife and her friends—“are going to get up a sort of entertainment with charades and things, all impromptu, more or less, of course—”
“Oh,” I said. I saw already what was coming.
“And they want you to act as a sort of master-of-ceremonies, to make up the gags and introduce the different stunts and all that. I was telling the girls about that afternoon at the club, when you were simply killing us all with those funny stories of yours, and they’re all wild over it.”
“Wild?” I repeated.
“Yes, quite wild over it. They say it will be the hit of the summer.”