“His father is a manufacturer of cheap candies.  He is advertised far and wide as ‘I.  Tapp, the Salt Water Taffy King.’  Fancy!  I presume you are quite right; they probably were nothing more than clam diggers originally.  The wife and daughters are extremely raw; no other word expresses it.  And that house!  Have you seen it close to?  There was never anything quite so awful built outside an architect’s nightmare.”

“They own Tapp Point? That is Lawford’s home?  Those girls are his sisters?” Louise murmured almost breathlessly.

“Whom did you take that young man to be, Louise?”

“A fisherman’s son,” confessed her niece, in a very small voice.  And at that Aunt Euphemia all but fainted.

But Louise would say nothing more—­just then.  On the approach of some of her friends, Mrs. Conroth was forced to put a cap upon her vexation, and bid her niece good-day as sweetly as though she had never dreamed of boxing her ears.

Louise climbed the nearest stairs to the summit of the bluff.  She felt she could not meet Lawford at this time, and he was between her and the moving picture actors.

Within the past few hours several things that had seemed stable in Louise Grayling’s life had been shaken.

She had accepted in the very first of her acquaintanceship with Lawford Tapp the supposition that his social position was quite inferior to her own.  She was too broadly democratic to hold that as an insurmountable barrier between them.

Her disapproval of the young man grew out of her belief in his identity as a mere “hired man” of the wealthy owner of the villa on the Point.  She had considered that a man who was so intelligent and well educated and at the same time so unambitious was lacking in those attributes of character necessary to make him a success in life.

His love for the open—­for the sea and shore and all that pertained to them—­coincided exactly with Louise’s own aspirations.  She considered it all right that her father and herself spent much of their time as Lawford spent his.  Only, daddy-prof often added to the sum-total of human knowledge by his investigations, and sometimes added to their financial investments through his work as well.

Until now she had considered Lawford Tapp’s tendencies toward living such an irresponsible existence as all wrong—­for him.  The rather exciting information she had just gained changed her mental attitude toward the young man entirely.

Louise gave no consideration whatsoever to Aunt Euphemia’s snobbish stand in the matter of Lawford’s social position.  Professor Grayling had laughingly said that Euphemia chose to ignore the family’s small beginnings in America.  True, the English Graylings possessed a crest and a pedigree as long as the moral law.  But in America the family had begun by being small tradespeople and farmers.

Of course, Louise considered, Aunt Euphemia would be very unpleasant and bothersome about this matter.  Louise had hoped to escape all that for the summer by fleeing to Cap’n Abe’s store at Cardhaven.