V

Eloise

[Sidenote:  A Summer Hotel]

The hotel was a long, low, rambling structure, with creaky floors and old-fashioned furniture.  But the wide verandas commanded a glorious view of the sea, no canned vegetables were served at the table, and there was no orchestra.  Naturally, it was crowded from June to October with people who earnestly desired quiet and were willing to go far to get it.

The inevitable row of rocking-chairs swayed back and forth on the seaward side.  Most of them were empty, save, perhaps, for the ghosts of long-dead gossips who had sat and rocked and talked and rocked from one meal to the next.  The paint on the veranda was worn in a long series of parallel lines, slightly curved, but nobody cared.

No phonograph broke upon the evening stillness with an ear-splitting din, no unholy piccolo sounded above the other tortured instruments, no violin wailed pitifully at its inhuman treatment, and the piano was locked.

At seasonable hours the key might be had at the office by those who could prove themselves worthy of the trust, but otherwise quiet reigned.

[Sidenote:  Eloise Wynne]

Miss Eloise Wynne came downstairs, with a book under her arm.  She was fresh as the morning itself and as full of exuberant vitality.  She was tall and straight and strong; her copper-coloured hair shone as though it had been burnished, and her tanned cheeks had a tint of rose.  When she entered the dining-room, with a cheery “good-morning” that included everybody, she produced precisely the effect of a cool breeze from the sea.

She was thirty, and cheerfully admitted it on occasion.  “If I don’t look it,” she said, smiling, “people will be surprised, and if I do, there would be no use in denying it.  Anyhow, I’m old enough to go about alone.”  It was her wont to settle herself for Summer or Winter in any place she chose, with no chaperon in sight.

For a week she had been at Riverdale-by-the-Sea, and liked it on account of the lack of entertainment.  People who lived there called it simply “Riverdale,” but the manager of the hotel, perhaps to atone for the missing orchestra and canned vegetables, added “by-the-Sea” to the name in his modest advertisements.

Miss Wynne, fortunately, had enough money to enable her to live the much-talked-of “simple life,” which is wildly impossible to the poor.  As it was not necessary for her to concern herself with the sordid and material, she could occupy herself with the finer things of the soul.  Just now, however, she was deeply interested in the material foundation of the finest thing in the world—­a home.

[Sidenote:  A Passion for Lists]