stood stoopingly, and frowned at the waters of the cove lifting from
the foot of the lawn that sloped to it before the house. "Three
lumbermen, two goodish-sized yachts, a dozen sloop-rigged boats: not so
bad. About the usual number that come loafing in to spend the night.
You ought to see them when it threatens to breeze up. Then they're here
in flocks. Go on, Marion."

He gave a soft groan of comfort as he settled in his chair and began
pulling at his short black pipe, and she let her eyes dwell on him in a
rapture that curiously interested me. People in love are rarely
interesting--that is, flesh-and-blood people. Of course I know that
lovers are the life of fiction, and that a story of any kind can scarcely
hold the reader without them. The love-interest, as they call it, is also
supposed to be essential to the drama, and friends of mine who have tried
to foist their plays upon managers have been overthrown by the objection
that the love-interest is not strong enough in what they have done. Yet
lovers in real life are, so far as I have observed them, bores. They are
confessed to be disgusting before or after marriage when they let their
fondness appear, but even when they try to hide it, they are tiresome.
Character goes down before passion in them; nature is reduced to
propensity. Then, how is it that the novelist manages to keep these, and
to give us nature and character while seeming to offer nothing but
propensity and passion? Perhaps he does not give them. Perhaps what he
does is to hypnotize us so that we each of us identify ourselves with the
lovers, and add our own natures and characters to the single principle
that animates them. The reason we like, that we endure, to read about
them, may be that they are ourselves rendered objective in an instant of
intense vitality, without the least trouble or risk to us. But if we have
them there before us in the tiresome reality, they exclude us from their
pleasure in each other and stop up the perspective of our happiness with