Valerie and Rita.

That evening at supper, a weird rite where the burnt offering was rice
pudding and the stewed sacrifice was prunes, Neville was presented to an
interesting assemblage of the free-born.

There was the clerk, the drummer, the sales-lady, and ladies unsaleable
and damaged by carping years; city-wearied fathers of youngsters who
called their parents "pop" and "mom"; young mothers prematurely aged and
neglectful of their coiffure and shoe-heels; simpering maidenhood, acid
maidenhood, sophisticated maidenhood; shirt-waisted manhood, flippant
manhood, full of strange slang and double negatives unresponsively
suspicious manhood, and manhood disillusioned, prematurely tired, burnt
out with the weariness of a sordid Harlem struggle.

Here in the height-of-land among scant pastures and the green charity
which a spindling second-growth spread over the nakedness of rotting
forest bones--here amid the wasted uplands and into this flimsy wooden
building came the rank and file of the metropolis in search of air, of
green, of sky, for ten days' surcease from toil and heat and the sad
perplexities of those with slender means.

Neville, seated on the veranda with Valerie and Rita in the long summer
twilight, looked around him at scenes quite new to him.

On the lumpy croquet ground where battered wickets and stakes awry
constituted the centre of social activity after supper, some young girls
were playing in partnership with young men, hatless, striped of shirt,
and very, very yellow of foot-gear.

A social favourite, very jolly and corporeally redundant, sat in the
hammock fanning herself and uttering screams of laughter at jests
emanating from the boarding-house cut-up--a blonde young man with
rah-rah hair and a brier pipe.

Children, neither very clean nor very dirty, tumbled noisily about the
remains of a tennis court or played base-ball in the dusty road. Ominous
sounds arose from the parlour piano, where a gaunt maiden lady rested
one spare hand among the keys while the other languidly pawed the music
of the "Holy City."

Somewhere in the house a baby was being spanked and sent to bed. There
came the clatter of dishes from the wrecks of the rite in the kitchen,
accompanied by the warm perfume of dishwater.

But, little by little the high stars came out, and the gray veil fell
gently over unloveliness and squalour; little by little the raucous
voices were hushed; the scuffle and clatter and the stringy no