The most desirable thing in life is to have the sense of doing your duty
without the trouble of doing it. Therefore days of preparation are
always delicious days. There is the mingling of repose with all the joys
of activity. To be planning to do things has in it more of triumph than
the actual doing. It carries the irradiating light of hope and purpose,
without the petty pin-prick of detail which comes when reality parodies
ideals.
Dick's first summer at home was a period of delight. He absorbed ideas
and so felt that he was doing something in this city of his birth which
now, in his manhood, came back to him as something new and strange. The
weeks drifted by and he seemed to drift with them, though both mind and
body were alert. All the things he learned and all the things he meant
to do were tripled and quadrupled in interest when he passed them on to
his two counselors-in-chief, Norris, solid and appreciative, Madeline,
even more believing and more sympathizing, but glorified by that charm
of sex which gilds even trifling contact of man and maid, making her
friendship not only gilt but gold.
So he spent his days in prowling about and meeting all sorts and
conditions of men, while Ellery slaved in a dirty and noisy office; but
when Saturday came and the Star went to press at three, Norris, with
the blissful knowledge that there was no Sunday edition, would meet
Percival, stocked with a week's accumulation of experiences. In the
hearts of both would be deep rejoicing as, at week-end after week-end,
they stowed themselves in Dick's motor and betook themselves lakeward,
nominally to go to the Country Club and play golf, but with the
subconsciousness for both that the lake meant Madeline.
There were, to be sure, other people, girls agreeable, pretty and
edifying, men of their own type and age, older men who did less sport
and more business, but all of these were neither more nor less than a
many-colored background to the little three-cornered intimacy which, as
Dick said, "was the real thing."
It came to be understood that the three should spend their Sunday
afternoons together, not on the cool piazza, where intrusion in its
myriad forms might come upon them, but off somewhere, either on the
bosom of the waters or on the bosom of the good green earth, who
whispers her secret of eternal vitality to every one that lays an ear
close to her heart.
The season was like the placid hour before the world wakes to its daily
comedy and tragedy; and yet, with all its superficial serenity, this
summer carried certain undercurrents of emotion that hardly rose to the
dignity of discontent, but which, nevertheless, troubled the still
waters of the soul. At first Madeline half resented the continual
presence of Norris at these sacred conclaves. He seemed so much an
outsider. Dick she had known all her life and she could talk to him with
perfect freedom, but his friend often sat silent during their chatter,
as though he were an onlooker before whom spontaneity was impossible.
Yet as Sunday after Sunday the two young men strode up together, she
grew to accept Ellery. First he became inoffensive; then she became
aware that his eyes spoke when his lips were dumb; and finally, when
words did come, they were the words of a friend who understood moods and
tenses. In some ways it was a comfort to have this buffer between her
and Dick. It helped to prolong the period of uncertain certainty.