people
before I know them, and this instinct tells me that I am not going to
like this Mr. Flint. He is so self-sufficient,--not conceited, but
completely satisfied with his own judgments. When he asks any one's
opinion, he does it as if it were a mere matter of curiosity how such
a person might feel, not with any idea of being influenced. I can
stand this from a person with strong convictions; but this young man
seems to have none. He actually smiled when I quoted Dr. Channing.

"Perhaps you never heard of him," I said, a little irritated by that
supercilious smile of his.

"Oh, yes," he answered; "but he was at such pains to set himself up in
opposition to my ancestors, that family pride compels me to resent it,
though my personal prejudices may be in his favor."

I cannot abide such trifling. It seems to make it ridiculous in any
one to be in earnest.

P. S.--Dr. Cricket asked me to-day if I would marry him. I told him he
was an old fool; but I could not make him believe it.

CHAPTER VII

ON THE BEACH

"The curving land, with its cool white sand,
Lies like a sickle beside the sea."

The next morning dawned cloudless. Nature, radiant in her bountiful
splendor, seemed to give herself to man, who, in response, thrilled
with something of the primal impulse which stirred his pulses in the
golden days before he had separated himself from the beneficent
currents of the Earth Mother's vitality to shut himself up within
brick walls with artificial heat, artificial light, and artificial
stimulants.

On such a day, it is good to be alive. Flint felt the sunshine in his
blood as he stepped out into the fresh, open air. For a while he
hesitated as to the use to which he should put the morning in order to
secure the utmost of its bounty. Then he bethought him of his duty in
returning the blue golf cape which he reproached himself as an idiot
for having taken. Brady had gone crabbing with Marsden, so Flint could
not delegate the duty to him, as he had intended. Accordingly,
slinging the wrap over his shoulder, in the middle of the morning, he
started on the path which ran along among the scrub-oak and blueberry
patches, to lose itself on the curving stretch of beach which lay
between the inn and Captain's Point, where stood the Whites' house
known in the region of Nepaug as "The White-House."

The Point stretched along at the m