"I'm so glad you look at it in that way. WE like it. We discovered
it three or four years ago, and we never let a summer slip, if we
can help it, without coming here for a week or a month. The place,"
I enlarged, "has the charm of ruin, though it's in such obvious
repair; it has a past; it's so completely gone by in a society
sense. The cottage life here hasn't killed the hotel life, as it
has at Newport and Bar Harbour; but the ideal of cottage life
everywhere else has made hotel life at Saratoga ungenteel. The
hotels are full, but at the same time they are society solitudes."

"How gay it is!" said the young fellow, as he gazed with a pensive
smile into the street, where all those festive vehicles were coming
and going, dappled by the leaf-shadows from the tall trees overhead.
"What air! what a sky!" The one was indeed sparkling, and the other
without a cloud, for it had rained in the night, and it seemed as if
the weather could never be hot and close again.

I forgot how I had been sweltering about, and said: "Yes; it is a
Saratoga day. It's supposed that the sparkle of the air comes from
the healthful gases thrown off by the springs. Some people say the
springs are doctored; that's what makes their gases so healthful."

"Why, anything might happen here," Kendricks mused, unheedful of me.
"What a scene! what a stage! Why has nobody done a story about
Saratoga?" he asked, with a literary turn I knew his thoughts would
be taking. All Gerald Kendricks's thoughts were of literature, but
sometimes they were not of immediate literary effect, though that
was never for long.

"Because," I suggested, "one probably couldn't get his young lady