Mr. Welles swam out of the breakers into clear water. Suddenly he caught the knack of the upward swing, and had the immense satisfaction of bringing the mattock down squarely, buried to the head in the earth. "There!" he said proudly to Mrs. Crittenden, "how's that for fine?" He looked up at her, wiping the sweat from his forehead. He wondered for an instant if she really looked troubled, or if he only imagined it. There was no doubt about how Vincent looked, as though he thought Mr. Welles, exulting over a blow with a mattock, an old imbecile in his dotage. Mr. Welles never cared very much whether he seemed to Vincent like an old imbecile or not, and certainly less than nothing about it today, intoxicated as he was with the air, the sun, and his new mastery over the soil. He set his hands lovingly to the tool and again and again swung it high over his head, while Vincent and Mrs. Crittenden strolled away, still talking. . . . "Doesn't it depend on what you mean by 'beauty'?" Mrs. Crittenden was saying. CHAPTER VII THE NIGHT-BLOOMING CEREUS _An Evening in the Life of Mrs. Neale Crittenden_ April 20. Nowadays she so seldom spoke or acted without knowing perfectly well what she was about, that Marise startled herself almost as much as her callers by turning over that leaf in the photograph album quickly and saying with abruptness, "No, never mind about that one. It's nothing interesting." Of course this brought out from Paul and little Mark, hanging over her shoulder and knee, the to-be-expected shouts of, "Oh, let's see it! What is it?" Marise perceived that they scented something fine and exciting such as Mother was always trying to keep from them, like one man choking another over the edge of a cliff, or a woman lying on her back with the blood all running from her throat. Whenever pictures like that were in any of the magazines that came into the house, Marise took them away from the little boys, although she knew helplessly that this naturally made them extremely keen not to miss any chance to catch a glimpse of such a one. She could see that they thought it queer, there being anything so exciting in this old album of dull snapshots and geographical picture-postcards of places and churches and ruins and things that Father and Mother had seen, so long ago. But you never could tell. The way Mother had spoken, the sound of her voice, the way she had flapped down the page quick, the little boys' practised ears and eyes had identified all that to a certainty with the actions that accompanied pictures she didn't want them to see. So, of course, they clamored, "Oh _yes_, Mother, just one look!"