Then, as Mrs. Barclay made no answer, she looked at her watch.
"Our train is not till ten o'clock," she remarked.
"Plenty of time," said the other. And then there was silence; and the sun's light grew more westering, and the sparkle on earth and water more fresh, and the air only more and more sweet; till two figures were discerned approaching the bathing-house, carrying hoes slung over their shoulders, and baskets, evidently filled, in their hands. They went round the house towards the cook-house; and Mrs. Barclay came down from her seat and went to meet them there, Mrs. Lenox following.
Two such figures! Sun-bonnets shading merry faces, flushed with business; blue flannel bathing-suits draping very unpicturesquely the persons, bare feet stained with mud,—baskets full of the delicate fish they had been catching.
"What a quantity!" exclaimed Mrs. Barclay.
"Yes, because I had aunt Anne to help. We cannot boil them all at once, but that is all the better. They will come hot and hot."
"You don't mean that you are going to cook all those?" said Mrs. Lenox incredulously.
"There will not be one too many," said Lois. "You do not know long clams yet."
"They are ugly things!" said the other, with a look of great disgust into the basket. "I don't think I could touch them."
"There's no obligation," responded here Mrs. Marx. She had thrown one basketful into a huge pan, and was washing them free from the mud and sand of their original sphere. "It's a free country. But looks don't prove much—neither at the shore nor anywhere else. An ugly shell often covers a good fish. So I find it; and t'other way."