my part, you never can! I
can see it now as it would be if you had your way--spick and span in
odious, glaring freshness, insulting the gray old ocean. The only
respectable buildings in America are those which the owner is too poor
to improve."

Marsden turned sulky. He did not more than half understand Flint's
remarks; but he had a dim impression that he was being lectured, and
he did not enjoy it; few of us do.

Flint, however, was wholly unconscious of having given offence. It
would have been difficult to make him understand what there was
objectionable in his remark, and indeed the offence lay more in the
tone than in the words. Flint's sympathies were imperfect, and he had
no gift for discerning the sensitiveness which lay outside his sphere
of vision. To all that came within that rather limited range, he was
kind and considerate; beyond, he saw nothing and therefore felt
nothing.

Yet he himself was keenly sensitive, especially to anything
approaching ridicule. He had not yet forgiven his parents, for
instance, for naming him Jonathan Edwards. He was perpetually alive to
the absurdity of the contrast.

"What if the great Jonathan _was_ an ancestor! Why flaunt one's
degeneracy in the face of the public?" As soon as he arrived at years
of discretion, he had proceeded to drop the Jonathan from his name;
but it was continually cropping up in unexpected places to annoy him.
The very trunk strapped onto the back of the carryall, that
sole-leather trunk which had travelled with him ever since he started
off as a freshman for the university, was marked, in odiously
prominent letters, "Jonathan Edwards Flint."

It provoked him now as he reflected that that female Jehu must have
seen it as she drove by. Perhaps that accounted for the suspicion of a
smile on her face. He didn't care a fig what she thought, and he
longed to tell her so.

The most tedious road has an ending, and the Nepaug highway was no
exception, except that instead of a dignified and impressive ending,
it only narrowed to a grass-grown track, and finally pulled up in the
backyard of the Nepaug Inn. The inn had stood in this same spot since
the days of Washington, and there was a tradition that he had spent a
night beneath its roof, though it puzzled even legend-mongers to
invent an errand which could have taken him there, unless he was
seized with a sudden desire for salt-water bathing, and even then it
must have been of a peculiar kind, for the in