ow and then he put her to the test by words
explicitly directed at her, and she replied with the dreamy passivity
which seemed her normal mood, and in which he could fancy himself half
forgotten, or remembered with an effort.

In the midst of this doubt she surprised him--he reflected that she was
always surprising him--by asking him how far it was from The Hague to
the sea. He explained that The Hague was in the sea like all the rest
of Holland, but that if she meant the shore, it was no distance at all.
Then she said, vaguely, she wished they were going to the shore. Her
father asked Breckon if there was not a hotel at the beach, and the
young man tried to give him a notion of the splendors of the Kurhaus
at Scheveningen; of Scheveningen itself he despaired of giving any just
notion.

"Then we can go there," said the judge, ignoring Ellen, in his decision,
as if she had nothing to do with it.

Lottie interposed a vivid preference for The Hague. She had, she said,
had enough of the sea for one while, and did not want to look at it
again till they sailed for home. Boyne turned to his father as if a good
deal shaken by this reasoning, and it was Mrs. Kenton who carried the
day for going first to a hotel in The Hague and prospecting from there
in the direction of Scheveningen; Boyne and his father could go down to
the shore and see which they liked best.

"I don't see what that has to do with me," said Lottie. No one was
alarmed by her announcement that if she did not like Scheveningen she
should stay at The Hague, whatever the rest did; in the event fortune
favored her going with her family.

The hotel in The Hague was very pleasant, with a garden behind it, where
a companionable cat had found a dry spot, and where Lottie found the
cat and made friends with it. But she said the hotel was full of Cook's
tourists, whom she recognized, in spite of her lifelong ignorance of
them, by a prescience derived from the conversation of Mr. Pogis, and
from the instinct of a society woman, already rife in her. She found
that she could not stay in a hotel with Cook's tourists, and she
took her father's place in the exploring party which went down to the
watering-place in the afternoon, on the top of a tram-car, under the
leafy roof of the adorable avenue of trees which embowers the track to
Scheveningen. She disputed Boyne's impressions of the Dutch people, whom
he found looking more like Americans than any foreigners he had seen,