"Oh, I have guests--at times. But I am often my own--good company--"

He stopped and rose. Nancy had appeared in the doorway. She crossed the
porch and came down toward us. She was in her bathing suit and cap, gray
again, with a line of green on the edges, and flung over her shoulders
was a gray cloak. She was on her way to the stables--it was before the
day of motor-cars on the island, those halcyon, heavenly days. The door
was open and her horse harnessed and waiting for her. She could not, of
course, pass us without speaking, and so I presented Olaf.

Anita had brought the tea, and Nancy stayed to eat a slice of thin bread
and butter. "In this air one is always hungry," she said to Olaf, and
smiled at him.

He did not smile back. He was surveying her with a sort of frowning
intensity. She spoke of it afterward, "Does he always stare like that?"
But I think that, in a way, she was pleased.

She drove her own horse, wrapped in her cloak and with an utter
disregard to the informality of her attire. She would, I knew, gather up
the Drakes and Bob Needham, likewise attired in bathing costumes, and
they would all have tea on the other side of the island, naiad-like and
utterly unconcerned. I did not approve of it, but Nancy did not cut her
life to fit my pattern.

When she had gone, Olaf said to me, abruptly, "Why does she wear gray?"

"Oh, she has worked out a theory that repression in color is an evidence
of advanced civilization. The Japanese, for example--"