Sammy Forbes!  It was a name to conjure with just then.  In the old days at college I had rather flouted him, but now I was ready to take him to my heart.  I remembered that he had always meant well, anyhow, and that he was explosively generous.  I called him up.

“By the fumes of gasoline!” he said, when I told him who I was.  “Blakeley, the Fount of Wisdom against Woman!  Blakeley, the Great Unkissed!  Welcome to our city!”

Whereupon he proceeded to urge me to come down to the Shack, and to say that I was an agreeable surprise, because four times in two hours youths had called up to ask if Alison West was stopping with him, and to suggest that they had a vacant day or two.  “Oh—­Miss West!” I shouted politely.  There was a buzzing on the line.  “Is she there?” Sam had no suspicions.  Was not I in his mind always the Great Unkissed?—­which sounds like the Great Unwashed and is even more of a reproach.  He asked me down promptly, as I had hoped, and thrust aside my objections.

“Nonsense,” he said.  “Bring yourself.  The lady that keeps my boarding-house is calling to me to insist.  You remember Dorothy, don’t you, Dorothy Browne?  She says unless you have lost your figure you can wear my clothes all right.  All you need here is a bathing suit for daytime and a dinner coat for evening.”

“It sounds cool,” I temporized.  “If you are sure I won’t put you out—­very well, Sam, since you and your wife are good enough.  I have a couple of days free.  Give my love to Dorothy until I can do it myself.”

Sam met me himself and drove me out to the Shack, which proved to be a substantial house overlooking the water.  On the way he confided to me that lots of married men thought they were contented when they were merely resigned, but that it was the only life, and that Sam, Junior, could swim like a duck.  Incidentally, he said that Alison was his wife’s cousin, their respective grandmothers having, at proper intervals, married the same man, and that Alison would lose her good looks if she was not careful.

“I say she’s worried, and I stick to it,” he said, as he threw the lines to a groom and prepared to get out.  “You know her, and she’s the kind of girl you think you can read like a book.  But you can’t; don’t fool yourself.  Take a good look at her at dinner, Blake; you won’t lose your head like the other fellows—­and then tell me what’s wrong with her.  We’re mighty fond of Allie.”

He went ponderously up the steps, for Sam had put on weight since I knew him.  At the door he turned around.  “Do you happen to know the MacLures at Seal Harbor?” he asked irrelevantly, but Mrs. Sam came into the hall just then, both hands out to greet me, and, whatever Forbes had meant to say, he did not pick up the subject again.

“We are having tea in here,” Dorothy said gaily, indicating the door behind her.  “Tea by courtesy, because I think tea is the only beverage that isn’t represented.  And then we must dress, for this is hop night at the club.”