Her smile faded as if a light had gone out in her. After a pause she answered rather wearily, "We've only been in Stamford a few months. We had always lived in town before."
We looked out of the window for a few moments in silence, while I formulated a hasty hypothesis of financial reverses which had driven the family from their city home, and registered a resolution to avoid the uncomfortable subject. Still, I reflected, the lower shore of the Sound is not precisely the resort of impoverished pride. Had I touched upon some personal sorrow of her own? She was not in mourning. Yet as she lay back in the green chair, one hand listless in her lap, the other twisting at the slender chain that ran about her neck and lost itself in the bosom of her gown, the fringe of her eyelid clear against the soft shadows of her profile, I imagined in her something of the enchanted princess bound by evil spells in some dark castle of despair. And immediately, with a surge of absurd valor, I saw myself striding, sword in hand, across the drawbridge to blow the brazen horn and do battle with the enchanter. The next moment she routed my imagination by returning lightly to the subject.
"It's a lovely place. I'm out of doors the whole time, and I'm so well I get positively bored trying to work off energy. I can't get tired enough to sit still and improve my uneducated mind. Ever so many nice people, too. By the way, whom do you know there?"
I was on the defensive again. "Why—I don't know anybody exactly there—but there are some friends of mine down at one of those beach-places in the neighborhood—the Ainslies. Bob was in my class."
She resumed the air of the connoisseur. "Why, I know them. I'm going to visit Mrs. Ainslie myself over the week-end. Do they know you're coming?"
"I'm not going to them," I said desperately. "That is, I may while I'm near by, but I haven't any definite plans. For once in my life I'm not going to have any definite plans, but just start out and see what happens to me. For six months I've been telling things I care about to a lot of kids that aren't old enough to care about anything; and now I want adventures. I went down to the station to take the first train that came along, go wherever it took me and let things happen."
"You might have gone to some romantic place," she suggested. "Three months would hardly be time enough for the Far East, but you might have tried Russia or the Mediterranean."
"That's just the point," I returned. "Romance and adventure don't depend on time; they only depend on people. If you're the kind of person things happen to you can have adventures on Fifth Avenue. If you're not, you might walk through all the Arabian Nights and only feel bored and uncomfortable. It all depends upon turning out of your way to pick up surprises. You're walking in the wood and you see something that looks like a root peeping out from between the rocks. Well, if you're the right kind of person you'll catch hold of it and pull. It may be only a root; or it may be the tail of a dragon. And in that case you ought to thank Heaven for excitement, even if you're scared to death."
By this time I almost believed in my own explanation. But Miss Tabor did not seem particularly impressed.
She put on the voice and manner of a child of ten. "You must be awfully brave to like being afraid of things," she lisped; then with a sudden change of tone, "Mr. Crosby, suppose—only for the sake of argument—that you're making this up as you go along and that you did know perfectly well where you were going, where do you think you would have gone?"