always tried to be more comfortable than she found herself, but that
is the condition of progress, and it is from the perpetual endeavor for
the amelioration of circumstance that civilization springs. The fault
may be with Florindo, in some way that she cannot see, but it is
certainly not with her, and, if it is not with him, then it is with the
summer, which is a season so unreasonable that it will not allow itself
to be satisfactorily disposed of. In town it is intolerable; in the
mountains it is sultry by day and all but freezing by night; at the
seaside it is cold and wet or dry and cold; there are flies and
mosquitoes everywhere but in Europe, and, with the bottom once out of
Europe, you cannot go there without dropping through. In Lindora's
experience the summer has had the deceitful effect of owning its riddle
read at each new conjecture, but, having exhausted all her practical
guesses, she finds the summer still the mute, inexorable sphinx for
which neither farm-board, boarding-houses, hotels, European sojourn, nor
cottaging is the true answer.

Sometimes Florindo or Lindora is out of all patience with the summer,
and in a despair which she is careful to share with Florindo, as far as
she can make him a partner of it. But as it is his business to provide
the means of each new condition, and hers to prove it impossible, he is
not apt to give way so fully as she. He tells her that their trouble is
that they have always endeavored to escape an ordeal which if frankly
borne might not have been so bad, and he has tried to make her believe
that some of the best times he has had in summer have been when he was
too busy to think about it. She retorts that she is busy, too, from
morning till night, without finding the least relief from the summer
ordeal or forgetting it a single moment.

The other day he came home from the club with a beaming face, and told
her that he had just heard of a place where the summer was properly
disposed of, and she said that they would go there at once, she did not
care where it was.

"Well, I don't know," he answered. "There would have to be two opinions,
I believe."

"Why?" she demanded, sharply. "Where is it?"

"In the other world. Fanshawe, the Swedenborgian, was telling me about
it. In one of the celestial heavens--there seem to be seven of them--it
appears that all the four seasons are absorbed into one, as all the
different ages are absorbed into a sort of second youth. This sol