Through a superstition, handed down from mother to daughter, that it is uncivil and even unkind not to keep saying something, they went on talking vapidities, where the same number of men, equally vacuous, would have remained silent; and some of them complained that the nervous strain of conversation took away all the good their bath had done them.  Miss Gleason, who did not bathe, was also not a talker.  She kept a bright-eyed reticence, but was apt to break out in rather enigmatical flashes, which resolved the matter in hand into an abstraction, and left the others with the feeling that she was a person of advanced ideas, but that, while rejecting historical Christianity, she believed in a God of Love.  This Deity was said, upon closer analysis, to have proved to be a God of Sentiment, and Miss Gleason was herself a hero-worshiper, or, more strictly speaking, a heroine-worshiper.  At present Dr. Breen was her cult, and she was apt to lie in wait for her idol, to beam upon it with her suggestive eyes, and evidently to expect it to say or do something remarkable, but not to suffer anything like disillusion or disappointment in any event.  She would sometimes offer it suddenly a muddled depth of sympathy in such phrases as, “Too bad!” or, “I don’t see how you keep-up?” and darkly insinuate that she appreciated all that Grace was doing.  She seemed to rejoice in keeping herself at a respectful distance, to which she breathlessly retired, as she did now, after waylaying her at the top of the stairs, and confidentially darting at her the words, “I’m so glad you don’t like scandal!”

III.

After dinner the ladies tried to get a nap, but such of them as re-appeared on the piazza later agreed that it was perfectly useless.  They tested every corner for a breeze, but the wind had fallen dead, and the vast sweep of sea seemed to smoulder under the sun.  “This is what Mr. Barlow calls having it cooler,” said Mrs. Alger.

“There are some clouds that look like thunderheads in the west,” said Mrs. Frost, returning from an excursion to the part of the piazza commanding that quarter.

“Oh, it won’t rain to-day,” Mrs. Alger decided.

“I thought there was always a breeze at Jocelyn’s,” Mrs. Scott observed, in the critical spirit of a recent arrival.

“There always is,” the other explained, “except the first week you’re here.”

A little breath, scarcely more than a sentiment of breeze, made itself felt.  “I do believe the wind has changed,” said Mrs. Frost.  “It’s east.”  The others owned one by one that it was so, and she enjoyed the merit of a discoverer; but her discovery was rapidly superseded.  The clouds mounted in the west, and there came a time when the ladies disputed whether they had heard thunder or not:  a faction contended for the bowling alley, and another faction held for a wagon passing over the bridge just before you reached Jocelyn’s.  But those who were faithful to the theory of thunder carried the day by a sudden crash that broke over the forest, and, dying slowly away among the low hills, left them deeply silent.