"I thought I should die of hunger. And when we got home to our own farmer's we ravaged the pantry for everything left from supper. It wasn't much. There!" Lindora screamed. "There is the taxi!" And the shuddering sound of the clock making time at their expense penetrated from the street. "Come!"
"How the instinct of economy lingers in us, too, long after the use of it is outgrown. It's as bad as the instinct of hospitality. We could easily afford to pay extra for the comfort of sitting here over these broken victuals—"
"I tell you we shall be left," she retorted; and in the thirty-five minutes they had at the station before their train started she outlined a scheme of social reform which she meant to put in force as soon as people began to gather in summer force at Lobster Cove.
He derided the notion; but she said, "You will see!" and in rather more time than it takes to tell it they were settled in their cottage, where, after some unavoidable changes of cook and laundress, they were soon in perfect running order.
By this time Lobster Cove was in the full tide of lunching and being lunched. The lunches were almost exclusively ladies' lunches, and the ladies came to them with appetites sharpened by the incomparable air of those real Lobster Cove days which were all cloudless skies and west winds, and by the vigorous automobile exercise of getting to one another's cottages. They seized every pretext for giving these feasts, marked each by some vivid touch of invention within the limits of the graceful convention which all felt bound not to transcend. It was some surprising flavor in the salad, or some touch of color appealing to the eye only; or it was some touch in the ice-cream, or some daring substitution of a native dish for it, as strawberry or peach shortcake; or some bold transposition in the order of the courses; or some capricious arrangement of the decoration, or the use of wild flowers, or even weeds (as meadow-rue or field-lilies), for the local florist's flowers, which set the ladies screaming at the moment and talking of it till the next lunch. This would follow perhaps the next day, or the next but one, according as a new cottager's claims insisted or a lady had a change of guests, or three days at the latest, for no reason.
In their rapid succession people scarcely noticed that Lindora had not given a lunch, and she had so far abandoned herself to the enjoyment of the others' lunches that she had half forgotten her high purposes of reform, when she was sharply recalled to them by a lunch which had not at all agreed with her; she had, in fact, had to have the doctor, and many people had asked one another whether they had heard how she was. Then she took her good resolution in both hands and gave an afternoon, asking people by note or 'phone simply whether they would not come in at four sharp. People were a good deal mystified, but for this very reason everybody came. Some of them came from somebody's lunch, which had been so nice that they lingered over it till four, and then walked, partly to fill in the time and partly to walk off the lunch, as there would be sure to be something at Lindora's later on.
It would be invidious to say what the nature of Lindora's entertainment was. It was certainly to the last degree original, and those who said the worst of it could say no worse than that it was queer. It quite filled the time till six o'clock, and may be perhaps best described as a negative rather than a positive triumph, though what Lindora had aimed at she had undoubtedly achieved. Whatever it was, whether original or queer, it was certainly novel.
A good many men had come, one at least to every five ladies, but as the time passed and a certain blankness began to gather over the spirits of all, they fell into different attitudes of the despair which the ladies did their best to pass off for rapture. At each unscheduled noise they started in a vain expectation, and when the end came, it came so without accent, so without anything but the clock to mark it as the close, that they could hardly get themselves together for going away. They did what was nice and right, of course, in thanking Lindora for her fascinating afternoon, but when they were well beyond hearing one said to another: "Well, I shall certainly have an appetite for my dinner to-night! Why, if there had only been a cup of the weakest kind of tea, or even of cold water!"
Then those who had come in autos gathered as many pedestrians into them as they would hold in leaving the house, or caught them up fainting by the way.
Lindora and Florindo watched them from their veranda.