If she wanted anybody to stay very much, she would even add: "I can't think of your walking toward the lake with such a gale in your face,"--regardless of the fact that the lake wind was the rarest of them all and that in nine cases out of ten the rain or snow would be not in people's faces but at their backs. If she didn't want anybody to stay, she simply ordered out the car and bundled him off. The delay in the offer of the car sometimes induced a young man to remain. Tasteful pajamas and the promise of a suitably early breakfast assured him that he had made no mistake. Cope's first call was made, not on a tempestuous evening in the winter time, but on a quiet Sunday afternoon toward the end of September. The day was sunny and the streets were full of strollers moving along decorously beneath the elms, maples and catalpas. "Drop in some Sunday about five," Medora Phillips had said to him, "and have tea. The girls will be glad to meet you." "The girls"? Who were they, and how many? He supposed he could account for one of them, at least; but the others? "You find me alone, after all," was her greeting. "The girls are out walking--with each other, or their beaux, or whatever. Come in here." She led him into a spacious room cluttered with lambrequins, stringy portieres, grilles, scroll-work, bric-a-brac.... "The fine weather has been too much for them," she proceeded. "I was relying on them to entertain you." "Dear me! Am I to be entertained?" "Of course you are." Her expression and inflection indicated to him that he had been caught up in the cogs of a sizable machine, and that he was to be put through it. Everybody who came was entertained--or helped entertain others. Entertainment, in fact, was the one object of the establishment. "Well, can't you entertain me yourself?" "Perhaps I can." And it almost seemed as if he had been secured and isolated for the express purpose of undergoing a particular course of treatment. "----in the interval," she amended. "They'll be back by sunset. They're clever girls and I know you'll enjoy them." She uttered this belief emphatically--so emphatically, in truth, that it came to mean: "I wonder if you will indeed." And there was even an overtone: "After all, it's not the least necessary that you should." "I suppose I have met one of them already." "You have met Amy. But there are Hortense and Carolyn." "What can they all be?" He wondered to himself: "daughters, nieces, cousins, co-eds, boarders...?" "Amy plays. Hortense paints. Carolyn is a poet." "Amy plays? Pardon me for calling her Amy, but you have never given me the rest of her name." "I certainly presented you." "To 'Amy'." "Well, that was careless, if true. Her name is Amy Leffingwell; and Hortense's name is----" "Stop, please. Pay it out gradually. My poor head can hold only what it can. Names without people to attach them to...."