tter
game was still considered too rough and inelegant for social occasions,
and as an opportunity to show off pretty dresses and graceful attitudes
the bow and arrow held their own.

Archer looked down with wonder at the familiar spectacle. It surprised
him that life should be going on in the old way when his own reactions
to it had so completely changed. It was Newport that had first brought
home to him the extent of the change. In New York, during the previous
winter, after he and May had settled down in the new greenish-yellow
house with the bow-window and the Pompeian vestibule, he had dropped
back with relief into the old routine of the office, and the renewal of
this daily activity had served as a link with his former self. Then
there had been the pleasurable excitement of choosing a showy grey
stepper for May's brougham (the Wellands had given the carriage), and
the abiding occupation and interest of arranging his new library,
which, in spite of family doubts and disapprovals, had been carried out
as he had dreamed, with a dark embossed paper, Eastlake book-cases and
"sincere" arm-chairs and tables. At the Century he had found Winsett
again, and at the Knickerbocker the fashionable young men of his own
set; and what with the hours dedicated to the law and those given to
dining out or entertaining friends at home, with an occasional evening
at the Opera or the play, the life he was living had still seemed a
fairly real and inevitable sort of business.

But Newport represented the escape from duty into an atmosphere of
unmitigated holiday-making. Archer had tried to persuade May to spend
the summer on a remote island off the coast of Maine (called,
appropriately enough, Mount Desert), where a few hardy Bostonians and
Philadelphians were camping in "native" cottages, and whence came
reports of enchanting scenery and a wild, almost trapper-like existence
amid woods and waters.

But the Wellands always went to Newport, where they owned one of the
square boxes on the cliffs, and their son-in-law could adduce no good
reason why he and May should not join them there. As Mrs. Welland
rather tartly pointed out, it was hardly worth while for May to have
worn herself out trying on summer clothes in Paris if she was not to be
allowed to wear them; and this argument was of a kind to which Archer
had as yet found no answer.

May herself could not understand his obscure reluctance to fall in with
so reasonable and p