“If you will insist on our living up to your notion of the real thing, we can set a special table for you in the kitchen.  I’ve no doubt we can borrow some pork somewhere.  You can take off your coat and eat your noon meal there, if you like, sustained by your sense of what is fitting,” offered Alec.  “As for me, I’m going in to wash up, put on my coat, and eat about twelve square inches of the strawberry-shortcake Joanna’s building for this table.  There won’t be any of that served in the kitchen, I warn you, Mr. Chase.”

“Thank you, I’m not pointing out my course of action, but criticizing yours,” retorted Neil, surveying with favour a vine-wreathed platter of broiled chicken, and eyeing hungrily a large salad-bowl filled with a compound which he knew by experience to be one of Joanna’s choicest.  “I say, to be consistent—­”

But he found himself delivering his views to Mrs. Burnside alone, for the rest had trooped in to make themselves presentable.

“You people certainly do manage to get a lot of fun out of your farming,” observed Dorothy Chase, as she watched Sally splashing her round arms in a vain effort to remove the tan.  “We live just as far out from town as you do, but nothing could be more different than our way of living from yours.”

“Well, if we depended on tennis, golf, and bridge for our fun we’d be just like you.  As we like hayfields, strawberry-patches, and pine groves better—­with tobogganing in winter—­we continue to be different.”

“I should say golf and tennis were just as healthy exercise as haying and picking strawberries.”

“No doubt they are—­but the company isn’t so select,” declared Sally audaciously, towelling her wet face so briskly that it emerged looking more than ever like the roses to which Neil had that morning compared it.

“You impertinent girl!  What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that Tom Westlake isn’t to be spoken of in the same breath with Donald Ferry.  Billy North is an idiot compared with Jarvis Burnside.  There aren’t two girls among all your society friends who can equal Janet and Constance, and—­”

“And Sally Lane, as a hostess, is infinitely superior to Dorothy Chase!”

“Don’t put words into my mouth.”  Sally came close and laid a warm pink palm on either of Dorothy’s cheeks.  “Sally Lane is such a bad hostess she says insulting things to her guests.  Don’t mind her.  She’s so excited and happy to-day over her strawberry acres she’s not responsible for what she says.  Come, let’s hurry down.”

“You people look more like a set of golfers at a summer hotel than you do like farmers,” began Neil Chase, still harping on the theme which seemed to cause him so much unrest, as the party sat down.

Max opened his mouth for a retort.  But, with one look at Donald Ferry, who sat across the table, he closed it again.  He met an amused glance of comprehension.  Then Ferry also opened his lips to speak.  But before the words found breath Mr. Timothy Rudd rose to the occasion.