She dissected him coolly.  Madge had a modern way of looking at things.  She was not in the least sentimental.  But she had big moments of feeling.  It was because of this deep current which swept her away now and then from the shallows that she held Dalton’s interest.  He never knew in what mood he should find her, and it added spice to their friendship.

“I didn’t know you were going to-morrow.”

“Neither did I till this morning, but I am bored to death, Georgie.”

She did not look it.  She was long-limbed, slender, with heavy burned-gold hair, a skin which was pale gold after a July by the sea.  The mauve of her dress and hat emphasized the gold of hair and skin.  Some one had said that Madge MacVeigh at the end of a summer gave the effect of a statue cast in new bronze.  Dalton in the early days of their friendship had called her his “Golden Girl.”  The name had stuck to her.  She had laughed at it but had liked it.  “I should hate it,” she had said, “if I were rich.  Perhaps some day some millionaire will turn me into gold and make it true.”

“Just because you are bored to death,” Dalton told her, “is no reason why you should accuse me of it.”

“It isn’t accusation.  It’s condolence.  I am sorry for both of us, George, that we can’t sit there under the trees and eat out of a basket and have spiders and ants in things and not mind it.  Here we are in the land of Smithfield hams and spoon-bread and we ate canned lobster for lunch, and alligator pear salad.”

“Baked ham and spoon-bread—­for our sins?”

“It is because you and I have missed the baked ham and spoon-bread atmosphere, that we are bored to death, Georgie.  Everything in our lives is the same wherever we go.  When we are in Virginia we ought to do as the Virginians do, and instead Oscar Waterman brings a little old New York with him.  It’s Rome for the Romans, Georgie, lobsters in New England, avocados in Log Angeles, hog and hominy here.”

There were others listening now, and she was aware of her amused audience.

“If you don’t like my little old New York,” Waterman said, “I’ll change it.”

“No, I am going back to the real thing, Oscar.  To my sky-scrapers and subways.  You can’t give us those down here—­not yet.  Perhaps some day there will be a system of camouflage by which no matter where we are—­in desert or mountain, we can open our windows to the Woolworth Building on the skyline or the Metropolitan Tower, or to Diana shooting at the stars,—­and have some little cars in tunnels to run us around your estate.”

“By Jove, Jefferson nearly did it,” said Waterman; “you should see the subterranean passages at Monticello for the servants, so that the guests could look over the grounds without a woolly head in sight.”

“Great old boob, Jefferson,” said Waterman’s wife, Flora.

“No,” Madge’s eyes went out over the hills to where Monticello brooded over great memories, “he was not a boob.  He was so big that little people like us can’t focus him, Flora.”