e at night with any stranger who can get another
stranger to introduce him and to drive over on fine afternoons to that
place by the lake and drink mixed drinks until some of them actually get
tipsy. I really think that it all is positively horrid. And so I'm quite
willing now to go to the White Sulphur. It is stupid, I know, but I've
always heard that it is intensely respectable. I will get my packing all
done this afternoon, and we will start to-morrow morning; and I think
that you'd better go and telegraph for rooms right away."

But to Dorothy's surprise, and also to her chagrin, Mr. Port refused to
entertain her proposition. He fully agreed with her in her derogatory
estimate of Saratoga life as found at Saratoga hotels; and he cherished
also a private grief incident to his (mistaken) belief that the cooking
was not so good as he remembered it, bright in the glamour of his sound
digestion in his youthful past. On the other hand, however, the waters
certainly were having a most salutary effect upon his liver; and the
move to Virginia would involve spending two days of hot weather in
toilsome travel, sustained only by such food as railway restaurants
afford. Therefore Mr. Port declared decidedly that until the end of July
they would remain where they were--and so gave his niece the doubtful
pleasure of an entirely new experience by compelling her to do something
that she did not want to do at all. It was a comfort to Mr. Port, in
later years, to remember that he had got ahead of Dorothy once, anyhow.

Being a very charming young person, Miss Lee could not, of course, be
grumpy; yet grumpiness certainly would have been the proper word with
which to describe her mood during her last fortnight at Saratoga had she
not possessed such extraordinarily fine gray eyes and such an admirably
dimpled chin. The fact must be admitted that she contrived to make her
uncle's life so much of a burden to him that his staying powers were
strained to the utmost Indeed, he admitted to himself that he could not
have held out against such tactics for another week; and he perceived
that he had done injustice to his departed sister in thinking--as he
certainly had thought, and even had expressed on more than one occasion
in writing--that in permitting her European movements to be shaped in
accordance with her daughter's fancies she had exhibited an inexcusable
weakness.

It was a relief to Mr. Port's mind, and also to his digestion--for
Dor