"Daphne," he ordered, "never inhale your smile! Nicotine itself is no more injurious to one's 'in'ards than is an inhaled smile." [108] With a sweep of the hand he seemed in that single moment to include the whole shining universe in the measure of his reproach. "Even with all--this," he demanded, "can't you be happy--_any_?" Certainly no one could have denied that it was a shining universe! Like a cake of white soap splashing in a pan of bluing, the little island gleamed in the Gulf! Whiteness beyond your wildest dreams of whiteness! Blueness beyond your wildest dreams of blueness! Pearl, azure, indigo, turquoise, ultramarine--all sizzling together in the merciless sun! Green there was too, of course--the vivid, clattering green of majestic cocoanut palms, the virescent flare of beech-grass, the crisp fan of scrub palmetto, and always the great, glossy mangrove trees rearing like giant laurel bushes in the dark, dustless splendor. But green in the Gulf, somehow, always seems like man's idea, or woman's--a sheer after-thought, as it were, of shade or trimmings. All the blue gulf wants is glare--and the eternal chance to grind pale rain bow-tinted shells into white sand! [109] Cuddled to the white sand but hiding from the glare, Jaffrey Bretton lolled in the pale shadow of an old wreck, staring out into the radiance. Half a rod away from him in a slim blue swimming suit that exactly matched his own, Daphne lay basking in her own sand nest. Nothing else on land or sea dozed or dallied because of the heat. "Slam--Bang--_Bang_" for a glistening mile the big billows boomed and roared on the beach. Fantastic as a shadow with a shine to it, the gray sharks slashed and reslashed through the churning tide! High overhead in inestimable thousands white gulls furled and feathered in ecstatic maneuver! Far on the outer reef bright Spanish mackerel leaped in the sun! And startlingly outlined across the horizon, as though in deliberate mockery of all man's futile efforts to walk on the water, a gigantic kite-shaped whipperee went reeling tipsily from wave to wave! With a gasp of almost pagan joy Jaffrey Bretton repeated his question. "Even with all this," he insisted, "can't you be happy--any?" [110] "Oh, Old-Dad," shivered Daphne, "you know just as well as I do that I would be perfectly happy if only I could forget!" "Forget what?" said her father. "Forget the hideous thing the President called me!" quivered Daphne. "Forget that--that awful letter my room-mate's mother wrote me! . . . Forget the newspapers! . . . Forget--forget--_everything_!" With a shrug of his shoulders, Jaffrey Bretton gestured back to the camp fire at the edge of the cactus thicket where, crouched before the fragrant coffee pot in a scarecrow suit of gay-colored ginghams, a weirdly majestic looking old man with long scraggly hair and sharply aquiline features added the one tragic note to the scene. "Lost Man has--'forgotten everything,'" he confided, a bit dryly.