ths
against the green robe. Fineness of mind that will not admit the
unescapable minor dirts of living, however much it may see them, a mind
temperate with reticence and gentleness, seeing not life itself but its
own delighted dream of it, a heart that had had few shocks as yet, and
never the ones that the heart must be mailed or masked to withstand. The
thing that passed had been continually sheltered, exquisitely guarded
from the stronger airs of life as priests might guard a lotus, and yet
it was neither tenderly unhealthy nor sumptuously weak. A lotus--that
was it--and Hook Nose stood looking at the lotus--and because it was
innocent he filled his eyes with it. And then it passed and its music
went out of the mind.

"_Ted_!"

"What? What? Oh, yeah--sorry, Elinor, I wasn't paying proper attention."

"You mean you were asleep, you big cheese!" from Peter.

"I wasn't--just thinking," and seeing that this only brought raucous
mirth from both Peter and Oliver, "Oh, shut up, you apes! Were you
asking me something, El?"

It was rather a change to come back from Elinor in scarab robes being
carried along in a litter to Elinor sitting beside him in a bathing
suit. But hardly an unpleasant change.

"I've forgotten how it goes on--the Dormouse--after 'Well in.' Do you
remember?"

"Nope. Look it up when we get back. And anyhow--" "What?"

"Game called for to-day. The Lirrups have started looking
important--that means it's about ten minutes of, they always leave on
the dot. Well--" and Peter rose, scattering sand. "We must obey our
social calendar, my prominent young friends--just think how awful it
would be if we were the last to go. Race you half-way to the float and
back, Ted."

"You're on," and the next few minutes were splashingly athletic.

Going back to the bath-house, though, Ted laughed at himself rather
whimsically. That extraordinary day-dream of the slave and the
Elinor Princess! It helped sometimes, to make pictures of the very
impossible--even of things as impossible as that. If Elinor had only
been older before the war came along and changed so much.

He saw another little mental photograph, the kind of photograph, he
mused, that sleekly shabby Frenchmen slip from under views of the
Vendome Column and Napoleon's Tomb when they are trying to sell tourists
picture post-cards outside the Cafe de la Paix. Judged by American
standards the work would be called rather frank. It was all
interior--the interi