“You might know that not for anything in the world, with hair as thick and as hard to dry as mine, would I wet it unnecessarily!” she flashed.
“It’s a mercy it’s so fine,” I quoth, maliciously, “or you would never get it up at all.” Mrs. Massingbyrd is notoriously vain of her wonderful hair.
“You might have spared yourself all the trouble,” I continued, cuttingly, as I took off my collar, and began on my shoes. “It’s not nearly as nice a color all soaked and wet; in fact, it’s rather unpleasant and seaweedy!”
“Wait until it’s dry,” she triumphed, radiantly. “You may in the end be glad you came. But I won’t!” she continued. “There’s nothing in it for me! You’re not going to present a sight for sore eyes now or at any other portion of the day! And there’s nothing to eat!”
“You’re a vain and greedy woman, Lydia Massingbyrd,” I said, severely. “And it would serve you right if the lockers of Mason’s boat were empty instead of being garnished with cans of soup and meat, as I suspect them to be.” And I started forth to rescue the capsized boat, but the tide had carried it on the reef, the mast caught between two rocks, and, already strained as it was, it cracked and broke.
And I was due to meet my wife and some other friends off Rye in a couple of hours. That’s what comes of going off on a lady’s sailing party, each man to be sailed down by a girl. A foolish idea, and hatched out, you may be sure, in the crazy pates of Felicia and her friend, Lydia Massingbyrd.
I did what I could for the poor boat. It’s a light little thing, an eighteen-foot cat, and, as I’ve often told Mason, heavily oversparred. I got her on the beach without much trouble, while my companion inquired anxiously, from time to time, as to the state of the larder.
I found I was right. There was soup, and shortly I was warming it by means of a wire cleverly slung around it and a wooden handle. For, luckily, my match case was watertight.
“Necessity is the mother of invention,” said I, taking my companion into favor again.
“Necessity is the mother of indigestion!” she retorted, and I saw her mind was back with our shipwrecked flesh-pots. “I can’t bear canned things!”