ou. Heaven knows, I haven't anything to write
about. It isn't as if we were living at one of the beach houses; then
I could do you some character studies, and fill your imagination with
groups of sea-goddesses, with their (or somebody else's) raven and
blonde manes hanging down their shoulders. You should have Aphrodite in
morning wrapper, in evening costume, and in her prettiest bathing suit.
But we are far from all that here. We have rooms in a farm-house, on a
cross-road, two miles from the hotels, and lead the quietest of lives.

I wish I were a novelist. This old house, with its sanded floors and
high wainscots, and its narrow windows looking out upon a cluster of
pines that turn themselves into aeolian harps every time the wind blows,
would be the place in which to write a summer romance. It should be a
story with the odors of the forest and the breath of the sea in it.
It should be a novel like one of that Russian fellow's--what's his
name?--Tourguenieff, Turguenef, Turgenif, Toorguniff, Turgenjew--nobody
knows how to spell him. Yet I wonder if even a Liza or an Alexandra
Paulovna could stir the heart of a man who has constant twinges in his
leg. I wonder if one of our own Yankee girls of the best type, haughty
and spirituelle, would be of any comfort to you in your present
deplorable condition. If I thought so, I would hasten down to the Surf
House and catch one for you; or, better still, I would find you one over
the way.

Picture to yourself a large white house just across the road, nearly
opposite our cottage. It is not a house, but a mansion, built, perhaps,
in the colonial period, with rambling extensions, and gambrel roof,
and a wide piazza on three sides--a self-possessed, high-bred piece of
architecture, with its nose in the air. It stands back from the road,
and has an obsequious retinue of fringed elms and oaks and weeping
willows. Sometimes in the morning, and oftener in the afternoon, when
the sun has withdrawn from that part of the mansions, a young woman
appears on the piazza with some mysterious Penelope web of embroidery in
her hand, or a book. There is a hammock over there--of pineapple fibre,
it looks from here. A hammock is very becoming when one is eighteen, and
has golden hair, and dark eyes, and an emerald-colored illusion dress
looped up after the fashion of a Dresden china shepherdess, and is
chaussee like a belle of the time of Louis Quatorze. All this splendor
goes into that hammock, a