“I am afraid, Uncle Hutchinson,” she observed, on the morning that this important step towards departure was taken—“I am afraid that during the past week or so your angel may not have been quite as much of an angel as usual.”
“No,” replied Mr. Port, with a colloquial disregard of grammatical construction, and with perhaps unnecessary emphasis, “I don’t think she has.”
“But from this moment onward,” Dorothy continued, courteously ignoring her uncle’s not too courteous interpolation, and airily relegating into oblivion the recent past, “she expects to manifest her angelic qualities to an extent that will make her appear unfit for earth. Very possibly she may even grow a pair of wings and fly quite away from you, sir—right up among the clouds, where the other angels are! And how would you like that, Uncle Hutchinson?”
In the sincere seclusion of his inner consciousness Mr. Port admitted the thought that if Dorothy had resolved herself into an angelic vol-au-vent (a simile that came naturally to his mind) at any time during the preceding fortnight he probably would have accepted the situation with a commendable equanimity. But what he actually said was that her departure in this aerated fashion would make him profoundly miserable. Mr. Port was a little astonished at himself when he was delivered of this gallant speech; for gallant speeches, as he very well knew, were not at all in his line.
On the amicable basis thus established, Miss Lee and her guardian resumed their travels; and, excepting only Mr. Port’s personal misery incident to the alimentary exigencies of railway transportation, their journey from the central region of New York to the seaboard of Rhode Island was accomplished without misadventure.
IV.
In regard to Narragansett Pier, Miss Lee’s opinions, the which she was neither slow in forming nor unduly cautious in expressing, at first were unfavorable.
“And so this is ‘the Pier,’ is it?” she observed in a tone by no means expressive of approval as she stood on the hotel veranda on the day of her arrival, and contemplated the rather limited prospect that was bounded at one end by the Casino and at the other by the coal-elevator. “If those smelly little stones out there are ‘the Rocks’ that people talk about at such a rate I must confess that I am disappointed in them”—Mr. Port hastened to assure her that the Rocks were in quite a different direction—“and if that is the Casino, while it seems a nice sort of a place, I really think that they might have managed the arch so as not to have that horrid green house showing under it. And what little poor affairs the hotels are! Really, Uncle Hutchinson, I don’t see what there is in this little place to make such a fuss about.”
“Dorothy,” replied Mr. Port, with much solemnity, “you evidently forget—though I certainly have mentioned the fact to you repeatedly—that the climate of this portion of Rhode Island is the most distinctively antibilious climate to be found upon the whole coast of North America. For persons possessing delicate livers—”