Durham felt a sudden warmth behind his eyes and in his throat. "I
think I do know--"

"No, you don't, really; you can't know how dear and strange and
familiar it all sounded: the old New York names that kept coming up
in your mother's talk, and her charming quaint ideas about
Europe--their all regarding it as a great big innocent pleasure
ground and shop for Americans; and your mother's missing the
home-made bread and preferring the American asparagus--I'm so tired
of Americans who despise even their own asparagus! And then your
married sister's spending her summers at--where is it?--the
Kittawittany House on Lake Pohunk--"

A vision of earnest women in Shetland shawls, with spectacles and
thin knobs of hair, eating blueberry pie at unwholesome hours in a
shingled dining-room on a bare New England hill-top, rose pallidly
between Durham and the verdant brightness of the Champs Elysees, and
he protested with a slight smile: "Oh, but my married sister is the
black sheep of the family--the rest of us never sank as low as
that."

"Low? I think it's beautiful--fresh and innocent and simple. I
remember going to such a place once. They have early dinner--rather
late--and go off in buckboards over terrible roads, and bring back
golden rod and autumn leaves, and read nature books aloud on the
piazza; and there is always one shy young man in flannels--only
one--who has come to see the prettiest girl (though how he can
choose among so many!) and who takes her off in a buggy for hours
and hours--" She paused and summed up with a long sigh: "It is