ave thought up
some excuse to refuse (not that we'd _fib_: but it's fair to economize
truth at times!) if Pat hadn't begged us to accept. You see, Ed Caspian
was invited as her fiance, and Mrs. Shuster as Larry's, and there was to
be a dinner in honour of the two couples. The poor child, a lamb led to
the slaughter, seemed to think that the altar of sacrifice would be more
tolerable if we were present to scatter rosemary and rue upon it. We
consented, of course. But I felt quite hard toward Peter Storm, who had,
in a way, been appointed by Jack and himself as her unofficial guardian
in the Grayles-Grice, and had apparently _failed_ her by stopping
behind with his Russian.

We were able to relieve the strain a little by taking the girl out for
walks in the old town, a part of Newport most interesting to us, least
interesting to Caspian. Dear Father brought me once to Newport to visit
people in a house which called itself a cottage and looked like a
castle, but that was when I was seventeen, in a summer holiday in the
midst of school life. I had the intense ambition of a flapper to be a
debutante; and because I envied girls who were "out" I did all I could
to usurp their prerogatives by flirting and "dressing up." I didn't care
a rap for anything or anybody over thirty. The Casino, the Yacht Club,
Bellevue Avenue for shopping or driving, Bailey's Beach, that haven for
any modern Venus to rise from the foam if she has a lovely bathing
dress, the twelve-mile Ocean Drive in all its luxury and millionairish
beauty--these represented Newport for me; and I _bet_ they'd have meant
the same for you in your salad days! They're still great fun, and
perfectly delightful and almost unique, it is true, but now I feel, with
Jack, the "call of the past." The Old Stone Mill, with its contradictory
histories, is more fascinating than the Casino. I could get quite hot
and angry arguing with any one who disputes the fact--_fact_, I
say!--that this extraordinary gray-stone tower draped with creepers and
backed with trees is the memorial of a Viking's wife. Longfellow's "The
Skeleton in Armour" was one of those poems which Lady Brighthelmston's
knee taught to Jack. "Speak, speak, thou fearful guest!" I had
forgotten, I'm ashamed to say, but Jack has reminded me about the figure
in "rude armour drest" which appeared when they took away a wall. I
just won't have my Viking Tower torn out of the eleventh century and
stuck into the seventeenth. So