“This is ideal.  I tell you, people don’t half know life if they don’t get out and eat in the open.  It’s better than any tonic at a dollar the bottle.  Nature’s tonic—­eh?  Free as the air.  Look at that sky.  See that water.  Could anything be more pleasant?”

He smiled at his wife.  This man’s face was glowing with simple pleasure.  He loved the out-of-doors with a love which could not explain itself.  But he now lost a definite climax when his wife’s comment was heard to be: 

“Monona!  Now it’s all over both ruffles.  And mamma does try so hard....”

After supper some boys arrived with a boat which they beached, and Dwight, with enthusiasm, gave the boys ten cents for a half hour’s use of that boat and invited to the waters his wife, his brother and his younger daughter.  Ina was timid——­not because she was afraid but because she was congenitally timid—­with her this was not a belief or an emotion, it was a disease.

“Dwight darling, are you sure there’s no danger?”

Why, none.  None in the world.  Whoever heard of drowning in a river.

“But you’re not so very used——­”

Oh, wasn’t he?  Who was it that had lived in a boat throughout youth if not he?

Ninian refused out-of-hand, lighted a cigar, and sat on a log in a permanent fashion.  Ina’s plump figure was fitted in the stern, the child Monona affixed, and the boat put off, bow well out of water.  On this pleasure ride the face of the wife was as the face of the damned.  It was true that she revered her husband’s opinions above those of all other men.  In politics, in science, in religion, in dentistry she looked up to his dicta as to revelation.  And was he not a magistrate?  But let him take oars in hand, or shake lines or a whip above the back of any horse, and this woman would trust any other woman’s husband by preference.  It was a phenomenon.

Lulu was making the work last, so that she should be out of everybody’s way.  When the boat put off without Ninian, she felt a kind of terror and wished that he had gone.  He had sat down near her, and she pretended not to see.  At last Lulu understood that Ninian was deliberately choosing to remain with her.  The languor of his bulk after the evening meal made no explanation for Lulu.  She asked for no explanation.  He had stayed.

And they were alone.  For Di, on a pretext of examining the flocks and herds, was leading Bobby away to the pastures, a little at a time.

The sun, now fallen, had left an even, waxen sky.  Leaves and ferns appeared drenched with the light just withdrawn.  The hush, the warmth, the colour, were charged with some influence.  The air of the time communicated itself to Lulu as intense and quiet happiness.  She had not yet felt quiet with Ninian.  For the first time her blind excitement in his presence ceased, and she felt curiously accustomed to him.  To him the air of the time imparted itself in a deepening of his facile sympathy.