d for all of them; and
when he had taken his cure the family made his after-cure with him, and
they had the greatest fun, after the after-cure, in travelling about
Germany. They got as far down as the Italian lakes in the early autumn,
and by the time Florindo had to go back the rest were comfortably
settled in Paris for the winter.

As a solution Europe was perfect, but it was not perpetual. After three
years the bottom seemed to fall out, as Florindo phrased it, and the
family came home to face the old fearful problem of where to spend the
summer. Lindora knew where not to spend it, but her wisdom ended there,
and when a friend who was going to Europe offered them her furnished
cottage at a merely nominal rent, Lindora took it because she could not
think of anything else. They all found it so charming that after that
summer she never would think again of hotels or any manner of boarding.
They hired cottages, at rents not so nominal as at first, but not so
very extravagant if you had not to keep the city rent going, too; and it
finally seemed best to buy a cottage, and stop the leak of the rent,
however small it was. Lindora did not count the interest on the
purchase-money, or the taxes, or the repairs, or the winter care-taking.

She was now living, and is still living, as most of her contemporaries
and social equals are living, not quite free of care, but free of
tiresome associations, cramped rooms, bad beds, and bad food, with an
environment which you can perfectly control if you are willing to pay
the price. The situation is ideal to those without, and, if not ideal to
those within, it is nevertheless the best way of spending the hot season
known to competitive civilization. What is most interesting to the
student of that civilization is the surprisingly short time in which it
has been evolved. Half a century ago it was known only to some of the
richest people. A few very old and opulent families in New York had
country-places on the Hudson; in Boston the same class had summer houses
at Nahant or in Pepperell. The wealthy planters of the South came North
to the hotels of Saratoga, Lake George, and Niagara, whither the vast
majority of the fashionable Northern people also resorted. In the West
it was the custom to leave home for a summer trip up the lakes or down
the St. Lawrence. But this was the custom only for the very
sophisticated, and even now in the West people do not summer outside of
their winter homes to