with impatience. Many of the things that seemed
so important to him were valueless in her more practical
eyes. Instead of a regime which ennobled
those who enjoyed its privileges, she saw only a slavish
devotion to worn-out traditions, and a clannish
provincialism which proved to her all the more
clearly the narrow-mindedness of the people who
sustained and defended them. So far as she could
judge, the qualities that she deemed necessary in the
make-up of a robust life, instinct with purpose and
accomplishment, seemed to be entirely lacking in
Kennedy Square formulas. She saw, too, with a certain
undefined pain, that Oliver's mind had been
greatly warped by these influences. Mrs. Horn's
domination over him, strange to say, greatly disturbed
her; why, she could not tell. "She must be
a proud, aristocratic woman," she had said to herself
after one of Oliver's outbursts of enthusiasm over
his mother; "wedded to patrician customs and with
no consideration for anyone outside of her class."

And yet none of these doubts and criticisms made
the summer days less enjoyable.

One bright, beautiful morning when the sky was
a turquoise, the air a breath of heaven, and the
brooks could be heard laughing clear out on the main
road, Oliver and Margaret, who had been separated
for some days while she paid a visit to her family at
home, started to find a camp that Hank had built