“I’m not perhaps just as I seem—I mean my views are rather liberal. In fact”—she brought it out with an effort—“I’m almost a socialist.” 

 The relief was so great that Ben couldn’t speak. He bent his head and kissed the hand that had tempted him a few hours before. 

 She did not resent his action. Her special technique in such matters was to pretend that such little incidents hardly came into the realm of her consciousness. She said, “At two-fifteen, then,” and swam away for good. 

 Later in the day a gentleman who owned both a bathing house and a bathing suit on Bailey’s beach was showing the latter possession to a group of friends. 

 “No one can tell me that Newport isn’t damp,” he said. “I haven’t been in bathing for twenty-four hours, and yet I can actually wring the water out of my suit.” 

 

CHAPTER II

 That same morning, about ten o’clock, Mr. William Cord was shut up in the study of his house—shut up, that is, as far as entrance from the rest of the house was concerned, but very open as to windows looking out across the grass to the sea. It was a small room, and the leather chairs which made up most of its furnishings were worn, and the bookshelves were filled with volumes like railroad reports and Poor’s Manual, but somehow the total effect of the room was so agreeable that the family used it more than Mr. Cord liked. 

 He was an impressive figure, tall, erect, and with that suggestion of unbroken health which had had something to do with his success in life. His hair must have been of a sandy brown, for it had turned, not gray nor white, but that queer no-color that sandy hair does turn, melting into all pale surroundings. His long face was not vividly colored, either, but was stamped with the immobility of expression that sensitive people in contact with violent life almost always acquire. The result was that there seemed to be something dead about his face until you saw his eyes, dark and fierce, as if all the fire and energy of the man were concentrated in them. 

 He was dressed in gray golfing-clothes that smelled more of peat than peat does, and, though officially supposed to be wrestling with the more secret part of correspondence which even his own secretary was not allowed to see, he was actually wiggling a new golf-club over the rug, and toying with the romantic idea that it would enable him to drive farther 

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