een at Beach Meadow with the
children, seeing George only in the rare intervals when he could run up
from town, two or three times a season perhaps, and really rather more
glad than otherwise to have Mamma with her. But this promised to be a
trying and overworked summer for him, and Mary herself was tired from a
winter of close attention to her nursery, and to them both the plan
seemed a most tempting chance for jolly little dinners together, Sunday
and evening trips in the motor, roof-garden shows and suppers. They had
had too little of each other's undivided society in the three crowded
years that had witnessed the arrival of the twins and baby Mary, there
had been infantile illnesses, Mary's own health had been poor, Mamma
had been with them, nurses had been with them, doctors had been
constantly coming and going, nothing had been normal. Both Mary and
George had thought and spoken a hundred times of that one first, happy
year of their marriage, and they wanted to bring back some of its old
free charm now. So the children, with Miss Fox, who was a "treasure" of
a trained nurse, and Myra, whose Irish devotion was maternal in its
intensity, were sent away to the seaside, and they were living on the
beach all day, and sleeping in the warm sea air all night, and hardier
and browner and happier every time they rushed screaming out to welcome
mother and daddy and the motor-car for a brief visit. And Mamma was
with Cousin Will. Or at least she HAD been--

Well, there was only one thing certain, Mary decided,--Mamma could not
come to them. That would spoil all the summer they had been planning so
happily. To picnic in the hot city with one beloved companion is one
thing, to keep house there for one's family is quite another. Mamma was
not adaptable, she had her own very definite ideas. She hated a dimly
lighted drawing-room, and interrupted Mary's music--to which George
listened in such utter content--with cheery random remarks, and the
slapping of cards at Patience. Mamma hated silences, she hated town in
summer, she made jolly and informal little expeditions the most
discussed and tedious of events. If George, settling himself happily in
some restaurant, suggested enthusiastically a planked steak, Mamma
quite positively wanted some chicken or just a chop for herself,
please. If George suggested red wine, Mamma was longing for just a sip
of Pommerey: "You order it, Georgie, and let it be my treat!"

It never was her treat,