“Retail reform isn’t of the least use,” she said vehemently to Isabel, that night.  “Next time, I’ll either import a colony, or let the whole thing alone.  Either I will go and live with them, or nothing.  It doesn’t do any good to drag them here to pine for their ashbins.  Just wait till next year, Isabel, and we’ll try one of the settlements.  This year, I’ve got to go to Quantuck and enjoy myself.”

With whatever misgivings she started for Quantuck, she certainly achieved her end of enjoying herself.  The summer colony, that year, was a large and lively one, and Phebe threw herself into it with the same fervor which had marked her entrance into slumming, and, before that, into medicine.  Skeletons and syllabi appeared to be alike forgotten; golf and swimming lessons took their place, and Phebe revelled in her out-of-door life as simply and as sincerely as Mac himself.  Out on the cliff at dawn, down on the beach for the bathing hour, out to the links for the afternoon, back on the beach to watch the moon rise, she was perpetually active, perpetually in earnest, perpetually in a hurry.  To the others, her energy was amusing and, at times, a little wearing.  They liked better to spend long hours on the beach, where their awning soon became a focal point for the fun of the bathing hour; they loved to roam over the moors, to sit down now and then on their own broad piazzas and glance from book to sea and from sea to book again with the curious indifference to time and literature which is characteristic of the place.

“Do stay down here, this afternoon,” Theodora urged her, one day.  “The Bensons are coming over here soon, and it is much more fun to be here, a day like this, than to be prancing around those links.”

But Phebe shook her head.

“I didn’t come down here to frivol, Ted; I leave that to you.  Nobody knows when I may have another chance to get myself in good form at golf, and I must make the most of this.”

“But there are more days coming, and the Bensons are such pleasant people to know.”

“I know more people now than I can get any good of,” Phebe said, as she balanced her driver, and then swept it around in a circle with a force which nearly overturned her.  “What’s the use of any more?  There comes Harold; he’s going to caddy for me, to-day.  I must go.”

“What do you suppose can be the attraction out at the links?” Theodora said, after she had gone.

“Sheer delight in the sport,” Hubert answered lazily, for he was sprawling on the sand by his sister’s side, and it seemed almost too great an effort to speak.

“Isn’t there any attendant knight?” Hope asked.  “Phebe is impenetrable; but I have sometimes wondered whether there might not be a social side to it, rather than athletic.”

“Don’t waste any romance on Babe, Hope,” Hubert advised her.  “I wondered about it, myself, for there is rather a gay crowd out there, and I didn’t know what might be going on.  I went out, one day.  I found the others all in a bunch, and Babe tearing around the links all by herself, with her poor caddie trotting hard to keep up with her.”