“I beg your pardon,” he said.  “Is this a private raft?”

The young lady, who had had plenty of time since the splash to arrange her countenance, looked at him with a blank coldness, and then suddenly smiled.

“I thought it was a private world,” she replied.

“It’s certainly a very agreeable one,” said Ben, climbing on the raft.  “And what I like particularly about it is the fact that no one is alive but you and me.  Newport appears to be a city of the dead.”

“It always was,” she answered, contemptuously.

“Oh, come.  Not an hour ago you were dancing in blue and green and a silver turban at a party over there,” and he waved his hand in the direction from which he had come.

“Did you think it was a good ball?”

“I enjoyed it,” he answered, truthfully.

Her face fell.  “How very disappointing,” she said.  “I didn’t see you there.”

“Disappointing that you did not see me there?”

“No,” she replied, and then, less positively; “No; I meant it was disappointing that you were the kind of man who went to parties—­and enjoyed them.”

“It would be silly to go if you didn’t enjoy them,” he returned, lightly.

She turned to him very seriously.  “You’re right,” she said; “it is silly—­very silly, and it’s just what I do.  I consider parties like that the lowest, emptiest form of human entertainment.  They’re dull; they’re expensive; they keep you from doing intelligent things, like studying; they keep you from doing simple, healthy things, like sleeping and exercising; they make you artificial; they make you civil to people you despise—­they make women, at least, for we must have partners—­”

“But why do you go, then?”

She was silent, and they looked straight and long at each other.  Then she said, gravely: 

“The answer’s very humiliating.  I go because I haven’t anything else to do.”

He did not reassure her.  “Yes, that’s bad,” he said, after a second.  “But of course you could not expect to have anything else to do when all your time is taken up like that.  ‘When the half gods go,’ you know, ‘the gods arrive.’”

The quotation was not new to Crystal; in fact, she had quoted it to Eddie not very long before, apropos of another girl to whom he had shown a mild attention, but it seemed to her as if she took in for the first time its real meaning.  Whether it was the dawn, exhaustion, a stimulating personality, love, or mere accident, the words now came to her with all the beauty and truth of a religious conviction.  They seemed to shake her and make her over.  She felt as if she could never be sufficiently grateful to the person who had thus made all life fresh and new to her.

“Ah,” she said, very gently, “that’s it.  I see.  You won’t believe me, but I assure you from now on I mean to be entirely different.”

“Please, not too different.”

“Oh yes, yes, as different as possible.  I’ve been so unhappy, and unhappy about nothing definite—­that’s the worst kind, only that I have not liked the life I was leading.”